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GRACE TAKES NOTES
The Shifting Sands Of Truth
The things we thought we knew
I traced my finger along the edge of an old medical textbook from 1952, its pages yellowed and brittle. It was on the counter at my grandparent’s house. I couldn’t help but smile at the open section about treating ulcers with bland foods, remembering how my grandmother had sworn by this treatment when I was a girl. It wasn’t until the 1980s that two researchers discovered that bacteria caused most ulcers and could be cured with antibiotics. My grandma had refused to believe it well into the 1990s when I was born.
“But, we’ve always known that ulcers come from stress and spicy foods,” she had insisted, shaking her head. It took years before she finally accepted the new reality, and even then, she would sometimes mutter about how things were more straightforward when you didn’t question doctors, even when they were wrong. Grandma was chatting with a neighbor how the science had evolved.
Just the other day, I was at a friend’s house who is studying for a PhD in astrophysics. He was trying to explain a research paper he was writing about dark matter. I do not understand most of what he says, but listen intently.
He thinks the current models are elegant, compelling — and possibly completely wrong. He speaks about the…