I just now felt compelled to rant about the “time” factor and what we assume equates with “validity” in science.  Is a publication ‘good’ if it is more than a few nanoseconds old? do we disregard it as being nonsense if it was published 50 years ago?  Good grief, even those things published 15 years ago, part of this new century, could be considered old.

There is subconscious bias of “time” and “exclusion” in our current social climate. This applies to “breaking news” and “breaking science”. Are those observations more valid because they are ten milliseconds old, and how many second will they be current, and how many minutes till they are considered ‘old and out of date’?.

This ‘time’ bias is also seen in- (and maybe it is just spill-over)  from- the current culture of “youth”, ie, unless it is under 20, it cannot be beautiful, unless it is mobile-friendly, it is rejected by google, unless it moves at warp factor 9 through a jillion high impact image accompanied by blaring noise, it is old school.

I reject this. For tens of thousands of years “man” in the inclusive and broadest sense of the word, has been forming ideas, recording data, and in essence, making scientific discoveries. That we pass these observations off as inconsequential, nonsense, and valueless, because they are old is the worst type of unmerited egotism. This behavior spreads the idiotic notion of “i am worth it” (which of course suggests that one thinks one’s self and one’s thoughts are of more value than others (but no one is worth more than another)) off into the world of real science. Such as, “unless it is recently published it is useless”.  This is pure egotism fueled by the explosion of public-written, self published articles, immediate dissemination of text and images (fact and alternative fact).

There is a wealth of information, old, dusty, archived, well thought out science (and history)– the trick is not to trade it in for new, spiffy, swirrling color data without first checking it out.