Posted on 12/20/2006 11:25:16 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Throughout history scientists from Galileo to Andrei Sakharov have been persecuted for challenging the orthodoxy of their societies. But in The Scientist as Rebel, Freeman Dyson advocates rebellion of a broader kind. Science, the theoretical physicist writes, should rebel "against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice." Benjamin Franklin is Dyson's ideal of the scientific rebel, one who embodied "thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred." If science ever stops rebelling against authority, Dyson insists, it won't deserve to be pursued by our brightest children... Dyson also rebels against the idea that scientists should only concern themselves with the problems of the laboratory... [H]e explores the uneasy relationship between science and religion ("Is God in the lab?"). He considers the qualities of mind expressed by the great scientists of the past in essays such as "In Praise of Amateurs" and "Seeing the Unseen." ...Dyson also stands opposed to the "reductionist" view of science, the concept that all knowledge, whether history, the arts, or ethics, "can be reduced to science." Dyson argues for a wider definition of knowledge that comes from a broader array of sources, including artistic values and religion, "parts of a human heritage that is older than science and perhaps more enduring."
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
The Scientist as Rebel
by Freeman Dyson
Science is a method of inquiry to determine truth. Science is not a philosophy of life.
I'd quibble and replace "truth" with "data".
Reason and calculation work together, which is why I'd go with truth. The goal of science is to discover truth & data is a tool used to do that. Data without interpretation doesn't mean or do much.
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