@TheMuffinMan2000 #7:
> i forget the specific name, but in the early 1800s when Pasteur published his works there was a mass panic event.
This sounds somewhat plausible. However I was unable find anything that would corroborate this assertion on the internet. Do you have a source for us?
All in all, it could be argued that knowing about germ theory could possibly have saved many lives throughout the ages (via more rational preventive measures and treatments). But I agree that the specific context in which such knowledge would have been introduced might be important.
Questions like: "How to make sure you are believed and that the knowledge can spread?" or "How to make sure you are not captured and tortured by the holy inquisition for blasphemy while trying to convey said information?", should probably be answered first.
> you should not fear germs, you can never be rid of them, and being more exposed to germs makes you more healthy not less.
This might be true for relatively harmless, endemic germs (like rhinoviruses that only cause mild symptoms of the common cold).
And I agree that one should not compulsively disinfect one's entire home without due cause. That doesn't make sense. It's impossible and inadvisable to try and live in a 100% germ-free environment. You gut alone is home to colonies of millions and billions of (species of) benign bacteria that help your body digest food.
BUT the statement that germs make you healthier is definitely VERY untrue for dangerous diseases like measles, smallpox, poliomyelitis, anthrax, to name just a few. Luckily nowadays there are vaccines for all of these pathogens. Depending on the pathogen's prevalence in your world region and other risk factors (job, age, preexisting conditions, etc.) you should be vaccinated as a preventive measure. Confer with a medical doctor to assess which vaccines make sense for you (e.g. smallpox has been eradicated via a mass-vaccination campaign in the 60s and 70s thereby rendering further smallpox-vaccination largely unnecessary).
Take being exposed to the measles virus for example. It does NOT make you healthier in any way. Quite the opposite actually:
"The measles virus can deplete previously acquired immune memory by killing cells that make antibodies, and thus weakens the immune system which can cause deaths from other diseases. Suppression of the immune system by measles lasts about two years and has been epidemiologically implicated in up to 90% of childhood deaths in third world countries,[...]. Although the measles vaccine contains an attenuated strain, it does not deplete immune memory."
So the measles virus can actually make you MORE susceptible to other diseases for about two years and actively damage your immune system.
Possible measles-complications include measles pneumonia (accounts for 56-86% of measles-related deaths), hearing loss, blindness, seizures, acute measles encephalitis (very high fever, severe headache, convulsions, altered mentation, possibly coma, brain injury or death) and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
SSPE, although rare, is especially vicious: it's a chronic, progressive brain inflammation (average onset 7 asymptomatic years after the initial measles infection in which the virus lays dormant in your cells) that primarily affects children, teens, and young adults. For unvaccinated infants being infected prior to being 15 months old it occurs as often as once in every 609 infections. No cure exists and it's almost always fatal. It is only caused by the wild-type virus, not by vaccine strains.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subacute_sclerosing_panencephalitis#Signs_and_symptomsMy point has been made clear, if you're interested you can research smallpox, polio and anthrax as well to see that being exposed to them doesn't make you healthier either.
> knowing about atoms is beyond useless, just think to yourself how much use you have personally had out of knowing that, people in the past wouldn't have any more use of it than you.
Knowing that the atomic hypothesis is actually true might not help a farmer or a handyman or a scribe in their daily lives. But it might arguably make their civilisation advance faster in physics and chemistry and consequently in technology than our human civilisation did without this knowledge. Given that they would have had a way to store and promulgate this knowledge (namely writing, inexpensive writing materials, high rate of literacy in the populace, printing press, etc.).
> the space and time stuff is all nonsense, einstien was wrong and our entire understanding is wrong
The man's name was Albert Einstein. He didn't publish nonsense and he wasn't wrong with much of anything.
On the contrary: Spacetime is an extremely useful concept, special (SR) and general relativity (GR) work exquisitely well. And if you've ever used a service that's relying on GPS-information you should thank Mr. Einstein for having laid the groundwork that would later make possible this highly convenient tool.
Don't believe me? Here's a paper (authored by Neil Ashby
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ashby) all about it:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5253894/pdf/41114_2016_Article_1.pdfThe abstract reads in part:
"The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses accurate, stable atomic clocks in satellites and on the ground to provide world-wide position and time determination. These clocks have gravitational and motional frequency shifts which are so large that, without carefully accounting for numerous relativistic effects, the system WOULD NOT WORK [emphasis added by me]. [...]
Relativistic principles and effects which must be considered include the constancy of the speed of light, the equivalence principle, the Sagnac effect, time dilation, gravitational frequency shifts, and relativity of synchronization."
On page 6 it says: "If such [relativistic] effects are not accounted for properly, unacceptably large errors in GPS navigation and time transfer will result."
I cannot be bothered to find a reference for this, but if I recall correctly, not accounting for relativistic effects would lead to the positioning accuracy of GPS degrading by several meters (tens of feet) per day. GPS without relativity would be utterly useless in the course of a week.
So far Einstein's theories of relativity have only made correct predictions (black holes, gravitational waves, time dilation, length contraction, gravitational redshift and many more). No experiment that has thus-far been performed has ever been able to falsify a prediction by SR or GR. Physicists would actually like to falsify at least one of Einstein's predictions because this deviation from his theory of space-time would actually give them new clues and lead them towards exciting new physics (and that's what physicists would love to discover).
Thus far they've been disappointed (and stunned) every time. Einstein just won't budge. He's almost annoyingly right. If anything, the man's underrated.
