By R. Kraulis
Dear fellow scientists,
If you are anything like me, I am sure you will have noticed a change in the air. Each day, we scientists enter our laboratories, fill our beakers and test tubes with our chemicals, fire up our bunsen burners as dramatically as safety concerns allow, and settle into an observational rut. Granted, we occasionally poke and prod at various animals, but it is always cold, clinical, sexless. I think it is clear that for the most part we are merely going through the motions.
We half-heartedly spout out hypotheses to explain the presence of nucleotides in this, that or the other, but our hearts are elsewhere.
I have spent a great deal of time pondering this listlessness, and have come to the conclusion that we are nearing the end of a zeitgeist.
Though most of us have yet to realize it, our minds are trying to usher us into a new wave of science. An era no longer confined to the tedium of theory and observation, no longer defined by our little games of guess and check.
Gentlemen (and gentleladies), welcome to the age of post-empiricism.
In this new regime, “facts” will no longer bog us down with their mindless accuracy.
Observation is a fool’s game, my friends. If we allow verifiability to continue its dominance over ideas, what will happen to the passion, the joie de vivre that inspires all great advances?
To illustrate the advantages of post-empiricism, I have included documentation from one of the young field’s first studies below.
As you can see, the y-axis represents my level of awesomeness. The x-axis indicates the extent to which chicks dig me. In the past, this correlation would have been near impossible to map out with any degree of accuracy. Even simply altering the amount chicks dig me presents a staggering array of difficulties. Without the need for observation, though, it becomes a simple matter of presenting results in graphical form.
In this case, the results are surprising. The general trend, that awesomeness and chick-diggery are positively correlated, follows the common assumption. However, the specifics (namely the plateau and the actual decline in awesomeness at upper-low-level chick diggery) are counter-intuitive. The importance of this is two-fold: first, we would never have noticed these results without a thoroughly baseless scientific system. Second, it is the first step towards a sound scientific argument in favour of women heaping themselves lustily upon my feet, pawing and snatching at me as a single frenzied mass of pure animal instinct.
I hope this letter has been enlightening. I am confident that its contents will lead us into a new age, much as post-modernism led the artistic community into an era of unbridled creative virtue. I leave you with a list of further discoveries I have made, which have been possible only through the ground-breaking and epoch-shattering nature of post-empiricism:
• Heisenberg’s uncertainty was a direct result of alcoholism
• Fully two thirds of all lightning bolts are caused by ill portent
• The cure for all known diseases is an old-fashioned malted chocolate
• My dad could, scientifically speaking, beat up your dad
• Blood of the type AB+ can be substituted adequately by cherry cola
• I did not “overreact” when you “kind of giggled” at the size of my manhood
• Butterflies are prettier than daffodils
• Butterflies are not as pretty as daisies
These results, I think, speak for themselves.
-Yours in sexless monkey-prodding,
R. Kraulis,
professional scientist