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Excellently put. When is the book coming out? ;). No, seriously, I think you should publish a collection of your essays.

I was fortunate to go to a school where in one of the first science lessons we were taught about Phlogiston: the thinking behind it and the experiments that proved its existence. One might think that being taught something that has been debunked for centuries is a waste of time bordering on the insane. Not so. In the next lesson, we re-created the experiment which disproved the phlogistic theory and then we looked at some of the rants of the eminent and influential thinkers who fought against the evidence.

The lesson was that we have to be open to change in ideas and must always be ready to evaluate new evidence as objectively as possible, because what we believe about the multi-faceted 'verse is based on our own tiny view of it at the time. I hope I never forget that.