Nothing of Importance    

“ Occasionally, scientists turn everyday beliefs into facts, or explain the workings of intuitively obvious things with their experiments. But facts about the workings of the universe, including the one inside your head, are not necessarily intuitively obvious. Sometimes, intuitions are just wrong—the world seems flat but it is not—and science’s role is to convert these commonsense notions into myths, changing truisms into “old wives’ tales.” Frequently, though, we simply have no prior intuitions about something that scientists discover—there is no reason why we should have deep-seated opinions about the existence of black holes in space, or the importance of sodium, potassium, and calcium in the inner workings of a brain cell. Things that are obvious are not necessarily true, and many things that are true are not at all obvious.