Posted on 12/06/2009 10:55:28 PM PST by neverdem
President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1960 farewell address contained more than an admonition about the danger of an expanding "military-industrial complex." That speech was also an early warning of the current unholy alliance between the government and a scientific community dependent on the government for its funding.
"... we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence...by the military-industrial complex.... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." [i]
"...(In) the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central...complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government...the solitary inventor... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields...
...the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.
Excellent catch!
Ikeswords bump!!
They lie to line their pockets. Period.
Maybe it used to be different, the good old days...
In the PBS series Cosmos there was an episode where an early mathematician, I think his name was Aristarchus, figured out the world is round, and even calculated the circumference and diameter of the earth.
He also said the earth revolves around the sun.
A politician opposed him and won the debate.
It took 1500 years for that PC situation to be corrected.
The shadow was dead center on the village well. No one could have missed it. Refusing to see. Sounds familiar...
They didn't understand the evidence he used to make his calculations, so they went with their feelings and followed the politician.
That is also familiar. PC is nothing new, and is just as misleading now.
Is the wedge which leads to perpetual prosperity in fact war?
**
Donald Kennedy and the corruption of Science Magazine
Mark Steyn: The Unrealistic Realist - Leader of the free world? Not Obamas bag.
Two Against Two: Bloomberg And Lautenberg Pair Up To Violate The Second And Fourteenth Amendments
Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.
Thanks for the ping!
The reason he lost the debate is he could not meet a cogent Aristotlean objection, and made it worse by the manner he tried to address that objection. The Aristotleans pointed out that if he was correct, the angle to any given fixed star should change throughout the year, since the earth would be (in fact, is) on different sides of the sun every 6 months. They knew the distance from the earth to the sun was very large, already, so the baseline of that triangle is long (in fact, 186 million miles).
A change in the angle to a star from this effect is called parallax; it was familiar from terrestrial surveying, which uses it to find the distance to remote objects. But no parallax to any star was observed. As far as the Aristotleans were concerned, Aristarchus's theory made a clear and falsifiable prediction, and the observations seemed to falsify it.
Aristarchus replied that no parallax would be seen if the fixed stars were infinitely far away. He didn't argue that parallax would exist but would be small if the stars were very far away - he argued that zero parallax was consistent with his theory, provided that the stars were infinitely far away, and claimed this showed that the stars were in fact infinitely far away.
The Aristotleans rejected this argument for two reasons. First, it posited an "actual infinity" which they held to be impossible and a sign of bankruptcy and "reaching" in any theory (which goes a bit too far, but has some plausibility to it). Second, they pointed out that this was not the proper way to relate theory to observation - it was "patching" the theory with ad hoc hypotheses whose net effect was to prevent the theory from having testable observational consequences. And this objection was in fact highly modern and essentially correct.
The reality is, observation did not support the heliocentric theory until instruments were developed powerful enough to measure the very slight parallax that does occur in angles to the nearest fixed stars. This took quite powerful telescopes and very precise alignment and control of their direction and measurement of their deflection from any given base. And it was only achieved in the 19th century. (Yes, really).
Between Copernicus and the 19th century, the observations were not yet there to confirm the heliocentric theory. It was believed in anyway because it explained the detailed movements of the planets much more simply than any rival theory (from the time of Kepler, basically - Copernicus himself had precious little additional reason to think it true, compared to Aristarchus. Galileo had a bit more after observing the moons of Jupiter, suggesting the earth was a similar subsystem).
The observations available at a given time do not always point to the correct theory of any given phenomenon. Sometimes the crucial evidence to distinguish two theories, or that prove the superiority of one over another, is simply lacking. This was the case in Aristarchus's day. He had the right answer by basically an inspired guess, but the available evidence was actually *against* that guess.
Beware of flip explanations of the history of thought that paint everything as a matter of purity and enlightenment on one side, and benighted ignorance and contempt for truth on the other. It is almost always much more involved that that, but popularizes do not care about the details. They want a morality play, not the historical truth. Ironically, they practice as moralizing history what they condemn within their morality play script, as anti-scientific prejudice.
The scientific community has been from day one the primary target of infiltration by the communists comintern agents. This class has thus been particularly susceptible to the siren’s sing of progressivism. The problem is that we now have the mechanics of Lysenko prevailing in all “sciences” to the point that they are far less “scientific” than any true science could be. Once ideology infects the scientific community it is used as an instrument of mass control rather than as an instrument of progress..
The fact that someone may be right, does not mean they will win, or even be respected.
The “scientists” and “politicians” of long ago were willing to put their agenda ahead of actual truth.
There is nothing new in what the PC crowd is doing now. It took 1500 years to correct the “science” and the PC crowd is not interested in truth. They are interested in control and money.
Good post. Unfortunately, no libtard cultist is ever going to read more than half or it before they start calling you names.
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