“Here I would only like to examine how the swinging pendulum affects our everyday lives. I choose the context of medicine because I’m most familiar with it. Second, for the sake of brevity I’m going to call one side NO, meaning we can’t know reality, and the other side YES, meaning we can know reality. Ignaz Semmelweis guessed there was a connection between the spread of disease and standard hospital procedures during the 1840s. He surmised that something unseen was being passed from patient to patient, so he devised new practices of hygiene, including hand washing by the staff, to test the idea. His methods worked. He kept meticulous records and published them. For this his peers hounded him out of Vienna. Louis Pasteur discovered micro-organisms, bacteria, about twenty years later. Joseph Lister invented antiseptic surgery based on the work of Semmelweis and Pasteur. So modern medicine was born. Why did it happen so quickly? And why didn’t it happen earlier?” (12/02/06)