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Dude, I'm finding this hilarious. 69 years to prove that something is a fluid? I picture two really old scientists watching the tape, only to have one of the ol
by cupofjoakim 13y ago
Dude, I'm finding this hilarious. 69 years to prove that something is a fluid? I picture two really old scientists watching the tape, only to have one of the old geezers turning to the other to spill the sacred words: "Told you so".
- digitalsushi 13y agoScience isn't about "told you so". It's about rigor, about completion. It may seem hilarious because of the length of time involved for the experiment to complete, but what if the results hadn't been what we assumed? Science is the only enlightenment we have, and to dismiss the outcome as obvious is to climb back into the dark ages.
- elnate 13y agoThen the other one would have said it. Everyone enjoys being proven right.
- jgreen10 13y agoReally? Scientists are people. Proving each other wrong is one of the biggest motivators to do years of painstaking, labour-intensive research. Of course, you can't prove someone wrong without being rigorous.
- negativity 13y agoIt gets finnier if you imagine Stephen Hawking saying "I told you so." to Leonard Susskind. D'OOOH... WERNSTROM!!!
- lightcatcher 13y agoYou might find this to be "finny": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93Hawking%E2%80%93Preskill_bet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93Hawking%E2%80%93...
- negativity 13y agoFinny is a perfectly cromulent word, sir...
- ctdonath 13y agoHow long are you willing to run a scientific experiment? People dream of projects that run decades or centuries or even millennia (see the Clock Of The Long Now); few manage to.
- sp332 13y agoWell really they could have figured it out as soon as it started moving, which would have been a few months. The first drop fell after a few years and they could have called it quits then, but they wanted a human to observe the pitch drop. That's the only reason it took so long.