Your science is stuck in my mystical

Look! Here are some scientists. Are they not cute? Are they not totally adorable like angry pfffting kittens as they scoff and furrow their brows and make many dismissive sounds with their pursed mouths, all in the general direction of the very idea of ESP, or psychic ability, or pretty much anything related to the mystical and the weird, the unquantifiable and the supernatural? Man, they really hate that.

Here they are, in the New York Times just recently, all aflutter that an esteemed fellow scientist and scientific journal -- Daryl J. Bem and The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, respectively -- wuld dare to publish a paper on the more than likely possibility that the beloved New Age chestnut known as extrasensory perception (ESP) might, just might, actually exist, in some tiny way, maybe, if we all just quit whining about it and opened up to the idea a little. The horror! The humiliation! What will happen to our funding?

Look! Here are the selfsame scientists, throughout the ages, baffled and entranced, confounded and enthralled; countless times have they been convinced that a huge range of formerly strange and magical phenomena -- dark matter, black holes, bacteria, a round planet, gravity, anal sex, Portland -- must be total bunk because, well, the phenom simply could not be proven by the sundry scientific models of the time, until they could.

Is that not adorable? How so many brilliant people are absolutely right until they are proven wrong? And vice-versa? Is anyone keeping track?

For my part, I am ever in casual love with these stories, with any slippery idea that knocks the brutally logical all asunder (and, oh hell yes, vice-versa), possibilities that make professional fact clingers moan, especially when someone in their field -- a generally respected someone, someone with credentials and credibility and a nice smile -- dares to dip his or her big toe into the waters normally reserved for twirling hippies who believe in crystals and astrology and things that go OM in the night.

Do not misunderstand. I adore science. I'm a big fan of scientists, and their beloved method. Who doesn't appreciate how hard, clear fact can effortlessly thwart the ludicrous crackpots of the world, prove the general idiocy of, say, Sarah Palin, or creationism, or George W. Bush? I am just as entranced by the discovery and unmangling of the universe, the mind, the human cell as anyone kneeling before the altar of Scientific American.

What's more, I understand their general lament, about the danger of allowing the utterly ridiculous any play in the rigorous pursuit of reliable knowledge. This way madness and the breakdown of lucid understanding lies.

Then again, if there's one divine lesson I've also learned in my short stack of years on this blue speck of remote spacedust, it is that we are, each and every one of us, also totally full of s--t.

Whoops. Wait, sorry, that might've been too subtle. What we are is, totally full of ourselves, thinking we know so much, assuming we have a reasonable, rational grip and grasp of the whole. Or if we don't, it's just a matter of time until we do because, well, clearly everything must contain some cogent explanation, somewhere, right? Such adorable gall.

Which leads to the other lesson I've learned, deep in the marrow: To suggest that the scientific method, peer-reviewed research, et al, while deeply precious to the advancement of the species, is the only path to valid human knowledge? I find this is almost exactly as packed with total shimmering BS as believing there's a hoary grandfather squatting on a gilded throne in the Carina Nebula surrounded by winged toddlers, all watching you make stupid choices and masturbate to Danish fetish porn. Which is to say, please.