A renaissance man, a top neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver, rock star and comic book hero, and probably the last hope of the human race.
Posted on 07/05/2011 11:56:43 AM PDT by decimon
It's official: science is the new rock and roll.
That's according to the physicist and author of Free Radicals Michael Brooks, who argues that scientists have laboured under the suffocating blanket of sober respectability for too long. It's time to throw off the shackles and celebrate the truly creative endeavour that science really is.
After World War II, he argues, science was given a makeover - turned into a brand much like Coca-Cola, Disney or McDonald's.
Science had proved its worth in the heat of battle, but while Penicillin and radar had helped us survive it was the awesome destructive power of atomic energy that had won it.
Science's importance was acknowledged but it was also mistrusted, and the brand identity of this new product was deliberately designed to emphasise its subservience to society and reinforced with adjectives like logical, responsible, trustworthy, objective and rational.
"The scientist became the monk of our age - timid, thwarted, anxious to be asked to help," he writes.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
What do you think?
Barbarian boffin ping.
This doesn’t even hint at the real problem, which is the politicization of science.
A renaissance man, a top neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver, rock star and comic book hero, and probably the last hope of the human race.
One of the basic tenants of science...DON'T TRUST--VERIFY!
Why can't liberals understand that?
The fact is that real science undermines and destroys the pseudo-scientific pretensions of the Left, whether they be "scientific socialism," psychoanalysis, or dialectical materialism.
Who pays the piper...
Government funding is driven by the political winds.
He was introduced as an expert on the notion of "truth".
Statement #1: He said that if you talk about "death panels" often enough, people will actually believe that they exist
Ummmmmmm. Howard? They DO exist.
Statement #2: You can get your news from many sources, but if you only get your news from Fox, then you are choosing to ignore a wider world of truth.
Ummmmmmm. Howard? Are the viewers of MSNBC really that much better off?
Statement #3: The people who say "I don't want evolution taught in my local school" are pushing a hardcore Christian viewpoint and are violating the First Amendment, as they force everyone to agree to their personal moral viewpoint.
Ummmmmmmm. Howard? They aren't pushing anything. They just want a particular topic to be ignored. That's not forcing any kind of morality on anyone.
The Left has a very odd understanding of "truth".
“Statement #2: You can get your news from many sources, but if you only get your news from Fox, then you are choosing to ignore a wider world of truth.
Ummmmmmm. Howard? Are the viewers of MSNBC really that much better off?”
More to the point, the viewers of MSNBC are missing the wider world of truth presented by Fox, ...sometimes.
The problem (in “trusting science”) is not in trusting SCIENCE, but in trusting the scientist, and the problem in trusting the scientist is that once the “supremacy of science” was socially accepted, the scientific community became an arrogant theocratic community.
According to the left-wing these are all scientific facts:
1.) A person’s future sexual behavior and desires is hard-wired at birth.
2.) Homosexuality is natural and good.
3.) Mankind is killing the earth through attempts to live a better life and prosper. So are many other animals as well just by simply eating and releasing waste.
4.) Each of us has an ancestor that was an ape.
5.) A human being is not really a human being until after birth and so it is scientifically alright to kill them.
If this is what is meant by science being the new rock n roll then it certainly is not a good thing. All of the above is not science but left-wing BS.
There is also the aspect of our current scientific medical culture that gives medical excuses for more and more behavior and simply prescribes a drug telling people (AND CHILDREN) that they are not responsible for their own behavior. More left-wing BS.
All of this is not a good trend. It is time to put a stop to it and not celebrate it as the author suggests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ehrlich
He was so highly respected that Germany put his face on their 200 DM banknote. A movie was made about him, starring Edward G. Robinson, entitled Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), which is quite good.
He was so famous, that one of the greatest scientific frauds of the 20th Century, Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, butterfly expert, public hysteric, and population explosion theorist, was named after him, to exploit the real Dr. Ehrlich's greatness. The two should never be confused.
I've seen artists assume that scientists won't “get” their work - and scientists assuming that they won't as well! - because it's “creative”. I don't get it. I don't begin to have the mathematical imagination required to understand what a quantum physicist does. Of course they are creative and imaginative!
I like science, especially physics and seismology. I like God and Torah too. They all work very well together for me.
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