Did you ever have to make up your mind?

The next time you get the feeling you should indulge yourself in the prejudices of academia, take a pill.

Some of us chickens go through waves of obsession from week to week or day to day. This fowl often obsesses over science, mainly because he wants to fly the coop so badly. But in the political avenues of science -- as in the political avenues of mostly anything -- you'll find the egocentrism and megalomania of a hundred thousand mega-Skeletors per second, locked away in stilted journal articles that provide gaps between actual reports of findings. Or smashed into the rhetoric of quasi-religious debaters as they unyieldingly and unintelligently attack their opposition through narrow doorways of groundless accusation and generalization.

So many overused words in there. I apologize.

I saw a book at the bookstore called something like "The Best Unrequired Reading of (insert year)," a part of the "Best American Whatever" series of anthologies, and it was edited by Dave Eggers of "What is the What?" fame. Leafing through, I found answers to a question posed to scientists: "What are your favorite things that you believe in, but cannot prove?"

One astrophysicist mentioned his belief that time does not exist. Another man mentioned his belief that, as opposed to the doctrine of "original sin" and Freud's claims, human beings are not, at their base nature, "rotten to the core."

Reading this, and thinking about Russell's Teapot (because a friend reminded me of it recently), I realized that plenty examples of simultaneously unfalsifiable and unverifiable claims exist in this world. For example, what evidence is there that stealing ideas from another person is bad? Sure, it may be bad for that person, but it's good for me! What's in it for me to be fair, especially if I'm clever enough to never be caught?

Also, what's in it for me to risk my life to save another person? "Right" and "wrong" are unprovable conditions placed by moral dogmatists to reinforce that joke we call positive law, and it cannot be verified that I would benefit from such an action, or especially that being humble about such an action would be beneficial to me. Anyway, what if no one's around to see me? What if I end up hurt?

Mr. Autrey saved that man on the subway tracks because he felt it was the right thing to do. He didn't take time to make a cost-benefit analysis. He had so much faith in what he was doing that he even did it in front of his two young daughters. If he had died doing it, his daughters would have experienced the whole thing first hand. Read about it.

"Faith" has become such an ugly word to scientists who've wrapped themselves in prejudice. People were originally uncomfortable around Einstein's special relativity theory, because no one likes to be told that they can't trust their senses. And it goes further than that -- to a certain point, you can't trust anything. You can't even trust your precious mathematics, or your precious rules of language, your precious symbols. You can't trust your ideals of fairness or justice.

But the aforementioned astrophysicist (not Einstein; earlier) mentioned that he couldn't prove that time did not exist, but he had faith that he was going to get there. He saw a future of understanding, and isn't that the core of science? Or even the core of the whole human experience?

Without faith, or dreams, there are no hypotheses or grand goals in discovery and exploration.

So lighten up!