Monday, January 26, 2015

P-S-Eh? : SCIENCE SAYS YOU'RE WRONG!

Right, wrong ... Honestly, I didn't bear any strong convictions about any of this in the first place.

Perhaps it was a bid to justify the absurd sci-fi bent of Strange Adventures, or possibly good-heartedness and a love of science on behalf of its editors (or a means by which to score some sweet postal discounts) but DC’s long-running anthology book made it a point to balance its fiction with a little fact. Its venue – “Science Says You’re Wrong!”

This is genuinely fascinating. I wrote it down.

The actual full title was a scolding “Science Says You’re Wrong If You Believe That …” which would lead into a lancing of popular factual misconceptions about science and the world around us. Among all the other public service comics which populated DC during these days, I’m not sure there was any which matched Science Says You’re Wrong for sheer brashness of confrontation.

Stupid fisherman! Why must you be so stupid?!


I’ve never really held a strong opinion on most of these topics – comets don’t always have tails? Sounds good to me, boss, you’re the scientist maybe! – but this one drives me a little nuts.

Bear with me, I'm a little high.

Surely nobody ever sees exactly the same anything from two different perspectives, technically speaking, since all we ever see is reflected light from an object, right? This isn’t a zen koan, man, but that’s kind of a bum fact, ain’t it?

I’m not even a hundred percent sure if any of this is genuine fact any more, or for that matter if anyone believed otherwise on some of that stuff. Science changes fast, man, it’ll bury you if it catches you napping.

I learned this from The Metal Men! Also it's not true. Which I also learned from the Metal Men.

Outdated facts are to be expected, although I’m honestly not the guy to tell you if any of these are no longer accepted as true – I learned my science from comic books, which is basically the same as not learning any science at all.

Possibly the only embarrassing downside of Science Says You’re Wrong, though, is that for a few issues the header ran like this:

You should see how it uses the apostrophe.

Just once, though, I would've loved for the header to exclaim "Science says you're wrong if you believe that ... bitch, Janet! She's always had it in for me!" Ah well, some dreams are beyond science, I suppose.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Can stop now, I'm off to drink a pint of lettuce. Mmmm, leafy.

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