science is fun

But TV ruins it.

So over the weekend, in between the helping administer the cleaning to a family estate sale, I caught a National Geographic thing on magnetic fields. Like all such shows today involving science, the apparent backdrop of explaining complex things like Van Allen Belts and magnetic navigation is "the end of the world".

So the show takes about a half hour explaining how the magnetic fields are created out of the molten core of the planet and that somehow the core is hardening and the magnetic field dying, takes a left turn and explains that the magnetic fields (polar north/south) change over time and have done so repeatedly by weakening the fields just like now, and that somehow the planet and its animals are in danger because of these gradual random and significant changes, and then there's one line tucked into the end of the show about how there's no proof linking such changes to mass extinctions (or any extinctions of any kind).

Much like anything the history channel does on mega disaster or the Mayan prophecies, it's ridiculous nonsense posing as arbiter of fate rather than scientific analysis or even hypothesis. But there is at least some scientific exposure placed in there, talking to the experts about how this stuff works. Then the editors get involved I guess. I would have imagined that NatGeo would be above such hype-based nonsense to attract attention, from my childhood experiences of reading about far away places and random scientific discoveries by naturalists and astronomers. But one imagines that there's at least somewhat less fact checking necessary to get at the actual material that the show presented in a less than honest and sensible fashion than has been the case with many many historical portrayals of prophetic events. We've seen similar problems with new technology like the LHC as though it's the end of the world. The types of changes exposed by studying things carefully and analytically can be revolutionary, but they're hardly the end of the world. Even the unlocking of the atom hasn't yet ended up as a doomsday scenario, and I was a child in the age when that was still considered a serious possibility (when a comic book like Watchmen can be written about it). That's still a formative memory of how human beings could at any moment decide to destroy each other by the millions. Something stops us. And it isn't some deities or even a deus ex machina plot device of some sort. Sometimes I think it's just better to be a force of creative influence than to destroy. Science doesn't seem to care one way or the other, which is probably a good thing.