Science & Society

Written two years after the catastrophic destruction of World War II ended with the initiation of the nuclear age, Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence is a graphically violent, sexually explicit, and surrealistic expression of Huxley’s bitter disappointment in humanity. The story is told via a rejected screenplay discovered by two friends on a Hollywood studio lot in 1947. All except the first section of the book consists of the text of the screenplay. The discarded script starts out by portraying post-World War II society as a civilization of vicious baboons. After a series of surrealistic…

The Science Of Fiction Tip of the hat to Eric Diaz for reminding me of the muse. Long before writing was invented, amazing stories were told through the medium of the ballad and the saga.  Those old tall tales and modern science fiction often have a few common themes - ethics,  morality, gadgets and heroic deeds.  Gadgets run the full gamut  - from the bag of wind used by Odysseus to fill his ship's sails, to the talking computers and planet busters in movies. There are no epic tales in praise of cowardice. About the year 1991 I determined to remedy that defect. The…

Science 2.0 is Openness and transparency.  Those buzz words mean open* access to both reading and publishing and sharing ones opinion on what is published.  Transparency means a process where any editorial decisions that are made are based on known written criteria which are the minimum to keep a science 2.0 website/journal free of spam and pornography.  The only question is how open and how transparent?  In my opinion the answer is that science 2.0 has to be open to everyone who is interested in practicing science.  There should be no initial litmus test…

In the latest issue of Science, one of the outstanding contemporary philosophers of science, Philip Kitcher, in a review of books on global warming, offers this excellent bit of wisdom on science and democracy: For half a century, since the pioneering work of Thomas Kuhn (3), scholars who study the resolution of major scientific debates have understood how complex and difficult judgments about the probative value of data or the significance of unresolved problems can be. The major transitions in the history of the sciences, from the 16th and 17th centuries to the present, have involved…

Moncktonian ClimatologyChristopher Monckton presents himself as an expert on climate. Since he is an expert on climate, it follows that we should all trust and believe him when he says that there is no problem with the Arctic sea ice. "Arctic ice extent is just fine: steady for a decade" Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. My dear, if you find science confusing, you should try politics! Margaret Thatcher, to President of the Royal Society, March 1990 . Christopher Monckton has been a very naughty boy.  he's been telling porkies1.  His 'scientific'…

The End of the World as Farce Our road to The Road begins in 1947, with Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think, an apocalyptic comic satire that just cries out for a movie adaptation by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.The End of the World as Farce Our road to The Road begins in 1947, with Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think, an apocalyptic comic satire that just cries out for a movie adaptation by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Like Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, Greener Than You Think satirizes America’s rags to riches mythology of upward mobility, except in Moore’s book the protagonist does not end…

3 Quarks Daily is a 'filter blog' that compiles stuff from around the web on a daily basis, in science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else they deem inherently fascinating. They say the name derives from that moment in 1964 when Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig postulated the existence of three new subatomic particles and Gell-Mann decided to name them "quarks", an unusual word meaning "croak" or "caw" which James Joyce had used in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"  Cut to present day and they are having a contest for best science blogging.  …

"The Year Of (insert your favorite cause here)" is usually driven by marketing departments and often to correspond to some sort of milestone.   2009 was "The Year of..." both Galileo and Darwin, for example, though no one seemed to find a way to bring either to mainstream popularity and make a buck.   What about 2010?    Sure, the UN declared 2010 the 'International Year of Biodiversity' but, like most things the UN is involved in, it cost a lot of money and doesn't actually do anything.    Outside science, 2010 is the Year of the Nurse.   Everyone likes…

"No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer."  Thomas Browne (1605-1682) "There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery." Enrico Fermi (1901—1954), Italian physicist. "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." Aristotle "Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." Martin Luther King, Jr. "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way…

Love Thine Enemy It is exceedingly rare that the scientist and the believer can stand on the same platform and present the same message to the world in the form of a law of universal application.  What is scientific, you may ask, about an injunction to love our enemies?  I hope to explain that point. Lives of great men all remind us   We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us   Footprints on the sands of time. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - A Psalm of Life Where science meets beliefMany people do not realise that the rule 'love thine enemy' is a more…