Many people either aren't sophisticated enough to understand or frank enough to admit it.

A long time ago I told my dad, who dropped out of school in fourth grade to help improve his family's budget, about the size of the universe and our supposed small place in it, and all he could do was laugh. "How can they know those things?", he asked me. I said, "trust me dad, they do"

Today I realize all of our knowledge of cosmology is built on extremely shaky foundations, which means more probably than not it is just wrong. So if my dad asks me once again "how they know those things", I would answer instead, "well, most of the time they make it up"

It's not that many people aren't sophisticated enough to understand, in fact the problem is that many people are too sophisticated to understand that they know, in fact, very little. "Unsophisticated" people never have that problem, they are fully aware of their own limitations.

And that's what's really funny!

• As you know - harvey1 - October 31, 2002 - 17:01 UTC