There have been brilliant rebels who put their own world-changing ideas on the line, only to end up like Doc Brown in his alternate timeline: humiliated, ridiculed, ignored and/or straight driven to insanity.
Science fiction has had some stunningly accurate premonitions. And we're not talking about broad predictions, here. No, this stuff is impressively accurate.
A big chunk of the world economy runs on human weakness. Peer pressure, vanity, insecurity, the fact that we just cannot resist the sight of melted cheese. There are some other, much weirder scientific principles that factor into what you buy. You might not know about them, but the people selling you things sure as hell do.
While we tend to think words are just sounds we make to express ideas, science is finding language is more like a fun house mirror, warping what we see in mind-blowing ways.
As a predominantly Christian people, Westerners think they know the Bible pretty well. But not everybody realizes that many of the most iconic features of Christianity were never mentioned by the holy book or the church, but were actually pulled out of the ass of some poet or artist who wanted to make a few bucks out of it.
