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"Just for a moment, suspend your scientific beliefs and imagine that electricity suddenly ceased to exist. Waking up, your alarm wouldn’t work. Unless you have
by seagreen 14y ago
"Just for a moment, suspend your scientific beliefs and imagine that electricity suddenly ceased to exist. Waking up, your alarm wouldn’t work. Unless you have a gas grill, you can say goodbye to your morning toast."
Uh, I'm not a scientist, but I imagine you would just die instantly.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoYou, and the rest of the universe, as your body and everything else disintegrated into various neutrally-charged subatomic particles, the universe becoming a black expanse of floating nuclei. I think that part of suspending your scientific beliefs means assuming that only the power grid failed, not the entirety of electromagnetics, and relevant physical laws.
- run4yourlives 14y agoYeah, I kind of thought it was funny he missed that too...our entire body operates on electric impulses.
- mkr-hn 14y agoDoes this pedantry add anything worthwhile? This isn't like someone saying "my food has no chemicals in it," which reflects a problematic and easily manipulated misunderstanding. No one's trying to sell electricity-free food.
- seagreen 14y agoFair criticism. Maybe not, but I find the "what if foo was missing" arguments emotionally manipulative and so worth making fun of. It's like going up to someone in 1935 and saying, "What if there wasn't any metal? Your life would totally suck!" Well, duh. If your point is "the industrial age depends on metal" or "the information age depends on electronics" go ahead and say it, but don't pretend like it's a novel idea. (Though as pavel_lishin pointed out I totally missed the "suspend your scientific beliefs" part of the quote, I, uh, quoted. Oops. At least his deadpan response is funny.)