No Science, Please – We’re British

American Thinker ^ | 9/27/05

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I've never read the book, but I've seen the movie many times.

Still waiting for my talking rings. ;)

[-YYZ-]

That's how I remember it, too.

I attended a private (or public as they would say) school in England for a short time. I have vivid memories of actually going to a laboratory for science classes and participating in experiments where we generated gasses and did various things with them. Back home in Nova Scotia we never did anything comparable to that until I took chemistry for the first time in grade 11.

Now, I work in the computer field now, meaning I have little if any practical use for chemistry or physics anymore, although they were absolutely necessary for my orinally planned career in engineering. I'm always glad, though, that I have at least a basic grounding in these subjects so I'm better able to make sense of technical mumbo-jumbo and pick apart junk science stories in the media. I regret that I didn't take biology, despite having no need of it, just for that grounding in life sciences. I've picked up a lot of that info over the years by osmosis, but I'm sure there's some fairly basic knowledge that I'm missing.

[Captain Rhino]

You haven't missed anything. Not all of Well's books knocked the ball over the outfield fence.

[wolfcreek]

"Won't be long until we follow suit."

Funny you should mention that, My Wife and I were in a Pets Mart the other day and the computers were down. Some young lady at the register was feverishly trying to add up our purchase the old fashion way (with pencil and paper). Lets just say she didn't learn that in school.

[dljordan]

"Well so long as the kids are happy and interested, I suppose it doesn't really matter whether or not they actually learn anything in school..."

I was thinking while reading the article that I didn't learn anything in high-school either. I then realized that I had learned math, rudimentary chemistry, history and the greatest of all, a lifelong love of reading. I think the children nowadays are being short-changed much to their detriment.

[Old Professer]

And Right Wing Professor chastised me for saying that no one needed biology beyond the mechanics of reproduction.

[theFIRMbss]

>"Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he has done is much the better part." Gottfried Leibniz

"The depictions of Newton and Leibniz in today's textbooks gain deeper meaning when one compares them to texts written closer to the episode in question. To discover how the celebrities appear in 17th- and 18th-century mathematical texts, I examined 17 texts from 1694 to 1768, published in Holland, England and France. I looked mostly at prefaces, though in some cases I looked more extensively at the body of the text. In the first text, which was published in two subsequent editions in the 1690s by Niewentijdt in Holland, Leibniz is generally mentioned in the preface more frequently than Newton. L'Hôpital--who is familiar to calculus students for the eponymous rule for finding the limit of a quotient of two functions by differentiation--was tutored directly by Johann Bernoulli. His 1696 text (not surprisingly) also clearly favors Leibniz over Newton, where he mentioned Leibniz 6 times, Newton only once:

"'I must yet give due recognition to the learned Mr. Newton, who has been recognized [in this capacity] by Mr. Leibniz himself: for he has also found something similar to differential calculus...But Mr. Leibniz characteristic [triangle] renders his [calculus] much easier and more expedient (pp. 12-13).'"

---------------------------------------------------

"In the seventeenth century came Newton and Leibniz, the two founders of infinitesimal calculus. Although their results were the same, their motivations and interpretations were quite different. This is a very natural occurrence in mathematics: the same ideas are treated in a different manner because they are used for different purposes. Leibniz developed his calculus based on differential quantities, their ratios (derivatives), and their infinite sums (integrals). ..."

Nonstandard Analysis and the Hyperreals

[NJ_gent]

"I think the children nowadays are being short-changed much to their detriment."

It's all about high self-esteem in the schools these days; make the kids feel good about themselves. That's great, except they aren't learning anything, so they don't have a reason to feel good about themselves. Little Johnny feels like he's on top of the world; meanwhile, he can't read, write, add, or think for himself.

[Amity]

What's frightening is that we moved my Sophomore year, and my second high school required only one math OR one science course to graduate, normally Algebra 1 or Biology. I'd taken both in ninth grade, and they initially suggested I take one over again. Idiots. They finally "compromised" by letting me take Geometry (which I enjoyed mightily). I still shudder over the idea of having to take a year-long course over again when I'd done just fine first time through.

But this rule meant some kids graduated that high school without taking any math beyond basic arithmetic. And it was supposedly a good school system. Very sad.

[Da_Shrimp]

I attended a private (or public as they would say) school in England for a short time. I have vivid memories of actually going to a laboratory for science classes and participating in experiments where we generated gasses and did various things with them.

Yes, that's definitely hw it used to be when I was in secondary school(for ages 11-16 or 18) back in the 70s. We did all sorts of great experiments in proper labs with bunsen burners and all.

I think my favourite experiment was when we made nylon and had a production line going, to see which group in the class could make the longest threads! The labs still exist in secondary schools, but with this new idea, it looks like they could be on their way out. Pity.

[Kozak]

Actually, it might be for the best. The students who are genuinely interested in chemistry or physics, and prepared to do the math, will have the science lectures and labs to themselves, while the deadwood are off becoming "relevant." ("Slimming issues"? Gark!)

yeah and like in the US they can start awarding nearly all of their graduate degrees in science to foreign students from China, India and Japan.

[Andy Ross]

This is immaterial. Anyone who suggests that Newton is unnecessary is a simple fool. His contribution to science is greater than any other.

"The Principia is pre-eminent above any other production of human genius." Laplace

[Killing Time]

Science is compulsory up to age 16 under the English National Curriculum.

Plenty of people have little aptitude for the hard sciences and so this type of science lite course is intended to be a humane option for the numerically challenged and if it gives them some grounding then good luck.

From what I see of my daughter's UK High School equivalent science teaching it is not bad, especially on the practical side - they still blow things up with bunson burners (although none have matched my chemistry teacher who once jammed the switch of a Chlorine cylinder in the "on" position" thus causing the evacuation of the school).

Certainly in the elite independent and state schools the standard of science education remains almost peerless in the world. Below that level though I get the impression that there is as much dumbing down as in other subject areas.

[-YYZ-]

Yes, that's definitely hw it used to be when I was in secondary school(for ages 11-16 or 18) back in the 70s. We did all sorts of great experiments in proper labs with bunsen burners and all

I forgot to mention that when I attended the private school I went to in England, where we had real science labs, I was in the equivalent of grade 5 at the time. I can't even imagine the different school experience I would have had and different paths I might have followed if I had had schools like that all the way through.

[theFIRMbss]

>Anyone who suggests that Newton is unnecessary is a simple fool

Fool?! Probably right.
Simple?! No. Newton's history   *
is an oddball one . . .

The tin foil nutjobs
like LaRouche get their "ammo"
from Newton's strangeness.

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*
"... Euler's fraud was premised on the version of empiricism associated with such followers of that influential Paris-based Venetian, Antonio Conti, who played a guiding hand, from Paris, in transforming what had been a relatively obscure dabbler in black magic, Isaac Newton, into a Voltaire-backed celebrity of the Eighteenth-Century British-French "Enlightenment." Although the system of moral corruption known as empiricism had been introduced to Seventeenth-Century England and France by the influence of Venice's Paolo Sarpi on such Anglo-Dutch and French figures as Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and John Locke, it was the 1688-89 capture of the British Isles, as led by the Netherlands India Company's William of Orange, and the related political and military developments of 1689-1714, which gave new twists to Sarpi's neo-Ockhamite doctrine. It is only from this point of historical reference, that we are able to situate the present-day political significance of reductionists such as Euler, Lagrange, Kant, Laplace, Cauchy, et al. for reference.

"The clinical characteristic common to most of the foregoing, or similar cases of behavior from among academics and the like today, is that person's hysterical blindness to what should have been obvious to him as folly in choice of method. Such behavior from among professionals, or the like, can not be fairly classed as anything but psychopathological "hysteria." ... "

The Pagan Worship Of Isaac Newton, by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Killing Time]

That's fantastic stuff!

[Andy Ross]

I don't care one bit what is said about Newton on LaRouche's website.

Virtually every great scientist has eccentricities. If we are to ignore each of these geniuses, then we must disregard the work by the Pythagoreans, the contributions from Kepler: the list is a large one.

Anyone who could possibly consider Newton to be "a relatively obscure dabbler in black magic" is clearly not someone who is familiar with mathematics, physics, astronomy, mechanics or philosopy. I'm counting you in this group. I'm quoting the likes of Laplace and Leibniz: you're coming back with Lyndon LaRouche?

"All that has been accomplished in mathematics since his day has been a deductive, formal, and mathematical development of mechanics on the basis of Newton's laws." Ernst Mach

Andrew

[Constantine XIII]

Recalling facts? Heaven forbid! ><

[theFIRMbss]

>Anyone who could possibly consider Newton to be "a relatively obscure dabbler in black magic" is clearly not someone who is familiar with mathematics, physics, astronomy, mechanics or philosopy. I'm counting you in this group

Instead of "quotes," think about the very nature of celebrity. In the modern world, the Establishment creates celebrities for the purpose of sales -- either things or places or ideas. You'd laugh at somebody who thought Paris Hilton really was something special. She's just a woman. Why do celebrities from the past make you freak? Newton was only a mathematician that the Establishment has crafted into a celebrity. And you get all misty-eyed contemplating him just like a teenage girl gets breathless at Paris.

[Andy Ross]

Are you now suggesting that Paris Hilton hasn't made valuable contributions to society?

Andrew