Quote:
Originally Posted by OLD BOY
Except that the 'common sense' question would have been (at least for me): "What the hell does all this smoke do to my lungs?". That is the very question I asked myself when I was young and encouraged by my peers to have a smoke.
The application of common sense generally gives you the right answer.
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So much of the history of science has been correcting our natural assumptions about the world.
The history of medicine for example: The germ theory of disease was not common sense, the idea diseases could be spread by microscopic germs we couldn't see. Common sense suggested it was bad air. It made sense, it would explain why it spread close to people and it explained the smells they were subjected too.
It was common sense that the Sun revolved around the Earth as, from our perspective, it seemed to do so. Even the earth being flat made sense.
The best example is physics where hardly anything makes any logical sense to us natively. Relativity is a mad concept. Try and wrap your head around time and space being the same thing!
---------- Post added at 20:09 ---------- Previous post was at 19:51 ----------
Also if smoking causing lung cancer was such common sense it wouldn't have been so popular and there would have been less resistance to the idea when it came.