I was watching a documentary on Stonehenge the other day and although Stonehenge is not new, there is a new theory about how the stones got there. The old one had the stones being brought from Whales by the Druids to Salisbury Plain from 160 miles away on cart with square wheels across a mountain range during the last ice age. The new theory is that they were delivered there from Ireland by Fed Ex. No really, the new guess is that they could have been brought closer by the Irish Sea Glacier. But I could argue my Fed Ex theory by saying that Fed Ex delivers to 9 billion locations including the south of England. And no one could argue that my theory is wrong because I can back it up with scientific evidence.
I have a theory about theories and my theory is that most of them are just plain theory. Theories are supposed to be educated guesses based on some sort of scientific fact but theory has been used to explain all sorts of mysteries where science can’t exactly connect the dots. If you state that something is fact, people can refute it. But if you throw out a theory, no one can say your theory is wrong unless they have one that is better. If they’re proven right you can back off your guess and say “it was just a theory.” I heard the famous comedian Stephen Wright say that his theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Cliff Klaven was the conspiracy theorist who shared his suppositions on Cheers during the 1980s and today, when sharing one on my own guesses, I do it using Cliff’s voice; it gives my ideas more weight. Theories were originally created so scientists didn’t have to say “I don’t know.” If you have a theory, all you have to do is put a little science behind it and have the tone of it could have happened this way. Billy Crystal did this in When Harry Met Sally; he had a theory that hieroglyphics was a comic strip about a character named Sphinxy. And there’s just as much evidence to support his findings as any other theory than science has provided. Until Billy Crystal came along, scientists believed that hieroglyphics were an ancient form of television for the Egyptians. The family would gather around a stone wall and someone would carve out a story; they thought it was the original reality entertainment called wall-o-vision. A comic strip, as defined by Wikipedia, is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Isn’t that what hieroglyphics is? That makes a whole lot more sense than the Egyptians trying to do a reality show on the wall.
This all brings me back to the original theory about Stonehenge. Although that theory has been disproven, no one can actually prove who built it so, technically, one cannot prove that the Druids did not build it; and such is the science of theory, or the theory of science, or the theory of science theory.
Ptolemy theorized that the earth was the center of the universe. Even though he was wrong, his theory was used for 1500 years. Even when Copernicus had a better theory, he was put at the stake by the Pope and recanted his correct theory; he waited for twenty years until his friend and college roommate Barbarini was Pope, then he republished his theory; it helps to have connections. His friend the Pope rewarded his hard work and patience and scientific data to back up his theory by making him King of the World and Sun God. No really, the Pope threatened to turn him into human torch. The theory was again recanted and his books were put on the Pope’s list of forbidden books for two-hundred years. So my theories about theories is that most of them don’t hold water; but it’s just a hypothesis.
a decidedly myopic rehashing of the not so obvious... Seinfeld should have thought of it
