Anyway, last night I was re-reading one of my favorite short books from Richard Feynman called The Meaning of It All. The book is basically just a transcript of three lectures he gave at the University of Washington in 1963. The lectures weren't on physics, they were on philosophy, science, and religion. And he spends some time debunking things like astrology, UFOs, mind reading, and other superstitious nonsense. But he goes into depth of how to think about things as a scientist, and I read a paragraph last night that I absolutely fell in love with and I wanted everyone to read it:

"That brings me to the fourth kind of attitude toward ideas, and that is that the problem is not what is possible. That's not the problem. The problem is what is probable, what is happening. It does no good to demonstrate again and again that you can't disprove that this could be a flying saucer. We have to guess ahead of time whether we have to worry about the Martian invasion. We have to make a judgement about whether it is a flying saucer, whether it's reasonable, whether it's likely. And we do that on the basis of a lot mroe experience than whether it's just possible, because the number of things that are possible is not fully appreciated by the average individual. And it is also not clear, then, to them how many things that are possible must not be happening. That it's impossible that everything that is possible is happening. And there is too much variety, so most likely anything you can think of that is possible isn't true. In fact that's a general principle in physics theories: no matter what a guy thinks of, it's almost always false. So there have been five or ten theories that have been right in the history of physics, and those are the ones we want. But that doesn't mean everything's false. We'll find out."

I am so sick of talking to people who keep harping on "but it's possible!" as if that's some kind of explanation. It's as though people don't know or appreciate the HUGE difference between "possible" and "probable". Feynman makes it clear in typically sweet fashion. I love that guy.