What is one ugly truth you learned as you got older?

@MarineBob

Maybe your teachers were misinformed by smarty-pants astronomers.

@rinkydinkydoink I think the goal posts got moved ....

@Captain i remember going to the museum of natural history and seeing “scientists BELIEVE dinosaurs were green and laid eggs “. Before that it was just dinosaurs were green and laid eggs.

@AthrillatheHunt Yes the big shifts have been - dinosaurs "slithered around on their bellies" to 'walked on their legs", from "were cold bloodeid and inactive" to "were highly active and sometimes hot blooded:, "were bare skinned" to sometimes had feather like structures on their skins", "were egg layers" to " were a mix of egg layers and live birthers". You see these sudden shifts in consensus because peoole will hold on to old ideas (for some a new idea means a loss of job) until the concensus has to change, and then the change is dramatically quick. And yet at the lower level of detail ideas (observations) reman the same. This is a complex one and I want ot share more ideas of the same with you.

@AthrillatheHunt Firstly I have never heard a scientist say all dinosaurs looked green. With feathers (this is smething people dont seem to have spotted yet) the colours are irredescent so can be bright and alter with angle. In a junge it makes sense to be green, but dinosaurs for a long time lived in near desert conditions and without gymnosperms so forrests animals may have hade green pigment but broken patterns of different background colours (like brown or black and green or different shades of green grey and brown also make sense as does dazzle camoflage such as zebra use so Im sure dinosaurs developed all these tactics. However the idea os slow change and sudden acceptance is all over academic history and economics

There are two pictures of the same street - a year apart - I forget when but it may have been 1915ish. In the first picutre there are over a 100 horse drawn vehicles ad i motorised one, a year later there are over 100 motorised vehicles and one horse drawn one. "Nothing is as powerful as an idea who's time has come" - Victor Hugo

@AthrillatheHunt Ideas waiting fo their time. The sphinx came from the last iceage times when Egypt had rain, not the smae era as the grate pyramids (that whole Egyptian control of "the truth" of the pyramids thing really annoys me). The photoemission effect shows particles exists, no its easily explained by solid state physics that descibles the way semiconductors work. There are valence bands of any solid object that stretch over the entire surface on any solid object and these are the things we call the "surface". Surface is just the place at which the wavefunction of whatever you're hititng it with exchanges neregy with the wavefuncton of which evry valence band has the same energy and an "electron/photon energy exchange happens. Thats why a light wave exchange gives you an increaing flat image as the ligth becomes redder and redder, and xray exhcnage shows more detail about microstructure, and ultre high EM scanning can start to image the valence bands of what we describe as individual atoms. The floor is in physicists not understanding material science. At lower energies the single atoms in effect cease to exists and thats why the collective whole object can emit a single electorn as soon as it has an excess energy of a single electron - because it has a valence band that covers the whoile surface. This is a common factor in science - people don't read across from one discipline to another. Its similar to the idea of continuous improvment call ed triz popular with the Russians. Take something that works in one place and try it in another. 2 examples yhey used were when the Americans spent millions inventing a pen to use on space, the Russians took pencils. Whent eh Americans got their hands on a Russian fighter that laughed that it was full of microvalves - until someone pointed out microvales are radiation hard.. Arrogance and dogma are the two biggest barriers to progress...

@AthrillatheHunt When the big rise in sea level occurs, and it could potentially come in a few years if a whole glacier gets undercut by melt wafer and gives way into the sea (becaause we now understand better that glaciers an potentially float on underlying sea water) peolple will start to realise its too late. When the first large methyl hydrate deposit goes into explosive decmporession because othe changing weights on the sea bed distrubing rock strucure either under the sea (less likely) or in coastal regions (more likely) the chnage in earth tmperature can be degrees in a single year or few years - no one is sure and it can almost certainly vary - the end for most of the population of the world will be very quick indeed - if indeed Trump and Putin don't blow us up first. That will certainly change the group think of what wil remian of the human race (either scenario) but it will be too late - and the eco and geosystems of the earth will be in chatge of the fate of th ebiology of the world for longer than any furthe human action can be sustained - we will be out of control. I thkn thats the biggest attitude change that will come so I'll call a halt there, but I stick to my guns on this one. Every revioltion does not start with a crank as the Engineer propoganda joke says - it starts with the rebalancing of systems - which include human group think aka concensus of opinion. Whoe would have believed in the 1960s summer of love that we'd have trumpianism. If you did wade throuhg my rambling rants thankyou. If you agree, don't bother trying to change the world. "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb ? Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change"