Posted on 05/29/2004 6:51:29 AM PDT by liberallarry
A theory that would lead to an even more difficult 'science of god'--what is it made of, how does it work, where is it located, how is it measured, how does it interact with matter & light, where did it come from, etc. That, I suppose, could be "proof" of a supergod, and so on and so on and so on. It is a line of reasoning that seems committed to the impossibility if not nonexistence of ultimate explanations.
In October the science thread were very nearly banned from FR because of the rancor. It only took a handful of posters to do it.
I also know many a libertarian scientist who has had a successful career yet does not believe in government funded science programs. These sort tend to have their own businesses or work in the private sector.
What I said was that some libertarians think that anything not supported by the private sector is not worth doing. What you just said doesn't contradict that at all: obviously if a line of research can be turned into a business, it's not something the government ever had to support anyway. Does that make such a businessman a science-hater? No, and I never claimed so. But there nevertheless are people on FR who are openly hostile to the idea of basic research. And when basic research dies, applied research will eventually follow.
I also find a whiff of anti-religious bigotry in your tone.
Feel free to read in whatever you want to see.
Everything has a logical explantion...
We, as humans, have an obligation to ourselves to actively pursue the ultimate root of our existance.
I'm not saying that we should just accept God, and leave it at that.
I'm saying that the more we learn about existence as a whole, the more it is realized that we are not here randomly.
Just my thoughts.
The "problem" right now in particle physics is too much creativity. The theories that are out there are brilliant. Absolutely ingenious. But they can't all be right. What we lack are facts to distinguish which work of creative genius is correct, and those facts can be purchased, actually.
Then Bush will direct NASA to service the finest telescope ever built, Hubble, before Hubble becomes useless space junk.
Enviromentalism (which is a pagan religion) has been exchanged for academcic science education in our public schools.
But true nevertheless. Clinton's budget included full SSC funding. Could Clinton have fought harder for it? Sure. But he never once fought against it.
I don't take a back seat to anybody in anti-Clintonism, but misrepresenting his record is not helpful.
So true. Science and math subjects in schools are continuously reduced in content so that kids who don't believe in homework can get passing grades. When I taught math, the soviets, most of europe, and asia all handily beat US students in national test constests. We responded by making kids "feel" better about their learning.
Don't blame libertarians for the dominant anti-science popular culture out there. While liberals hate science and want to return us to the Stone Age, the free market has a history of channeling vast oceans of capital into any area of science that is not chained down by regulation. Look at Silicon Valley in the Nineties: information science and technolgy romped because it was the least regulated area of research. Nuclear science, on the other hand, languished during the same period because regulators are actively trying to drive it out of existence.
We often hear the charge that the free market supports only near-term commercial applications. Remember Project Ozma? This was the poky little federal program a generation ago, funded at a million or so a year, that once conducted radio searches for evidence of intelligent civilizations in outer space. Small as Ozma was, it became an object of derision simply because of the far-outness of its mission. So during the Proxmire years, Ozma was quickly cancelled.
It was the free market, not idealistic liberals with government funds, that came to the rescue. Space enthusiasts with money (Paul Allen, Arthur C Clarke) formed a foundation to buy spare time on radiotelescopes and kep an improved version of the search going. Before long the privatized search was producing so much data that a new problem emerged: how to reduce the flood of data and scan it for artificial signals without buying exorbitant amounts of time on supercomputers? The team took another half-formed idea from academia, grid computing, and adapted it to their search for extraterrestrial intelligence: break the data into small segments that can be distributed to small computers logging on over the Internet. In meeting the space buffs' esoteric need, a whole new style of computing came into being. Grid computing is now being applied to a number of commercial problems, such as protein folding to test the effectiveness of new cancer drugs. Could any government program have produced spinoffs like that?
Meanwhile, back at the free-market ranch, one of several competing teams is going to take the X Prize this year. Even the X Prize itself has attracted major new funding, from an Iranian exile entrepreneur. It's now the Ansari X Prize.
We spend more time teaching about "diversity" more than we do on science and math.. That is not good.
Certainly. The war against Intellectual Ludditism is always worth waging.
;-)
Much easier to lower standards than to raise them. Yep, it's not the results, it's about trying and feeling good, teamwork. Achievement and excellence are hard - embrace and celebrate failure. Oh my, another rant.
TUCvER bump.
Companies are required to apply for federal licenses to fly into space. I wonder what the cost of those licenses is.
Maybe they could go to Mexico and loft whatever they want.
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