I am a giant lover of all things woo woo. Law of Attraction, E-Squared, Many Lives Many Masters, Extra-terrestrial communications, etc etc. Love it. My physics teacher in high school was hardcore into X-Files and as a class, we watched it religiously. He would challenge us to question everything and keep an open mind. My high school biology teacher taught me that the best thing about biology is that there is always an exception to the rule and life will always find a way to survive anywhere. What’s that you say? Life can’t exist at temperatures above 100 degrees Celsius? Oh, wait - thermophiles. Okay, life can’t exist is extremely acidic environments - acidophiles can! Hmm, legendary giant squids? Yup - they exist too.
As scientists, our job isn’t just to explore the known but to explore the unknown. That’s the whole point of discovery: not to assume something doesn’t exist, but to wonder if it does. This article on the theory of a conscious universe, for example, is such a great example of why I fell in love with science in the first place. It’s open to the possibilities. We don’t actually know the answers yet, but we’re willing to design some experiments to try to figure them out, fully knowing that we may never really have the full picture. And that’s okay. Because I kind of like living in a world where not everything has been discovered yet, where there is still some mystery left to the workings of the Universe. Because otherwise, we’re just validating other people’s research instead of coming up with our own unique ideas. And personally, I’m way more interested in figuring out why something went wrong than just seeing it go right, yet again… sigh… Give me a good outlier to investigate any day, because it’s from those outliers where so many great discoveries have originated.