Posted on 10/30/2002 8:03:45 PM PST by cornelis
It is not so obvious that physical scientists need a liberal arts education, rooted in the study of language. They themselves assert that they have no time for it. They have insisted on the abolition of language requirements in almost every university graduate program in America. This development is directly related to the massive amount of fraud which now typifies scientific publication in this country. This scientific community has lost track of the historical and ethical roots of our civilization, the only civilization which has fostered the scientific ethic and considerable scientific research and discovery. Increasingly young men enter the sciences who do not understand that science is not a given, but an achievement, a tradition of research and discovery which si the hard-won accomplishment of one culture, fostered carefully and slowly for millenia until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scientists have lost touch with their own culture. They live without a narrative structure which frames and makes moral sense of their lives. They seem to belong to no culture and feel the claims of no cultural norms, claims that would be introduced and reinforced by a rigorous study of their own cultural traditions over the past twenty-five hundred years. For such people the borderline between fudging, misreporting of results, and outright fraud becomes as unclear as their own cultural heritage. All too often it is those who report or investigate such fraud who find themselves de-funded by the "profession." The attainment of truth is possible only within a tradition, as Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested. A rootless, traditionless, monoglot scientific elite has lost the basis of discovery, in science or any other area. Since they cannot discover truth and will not live without grants, they must lie.Recently conservatives have talked much of valuing creativity and an openness to the real world. If such an attitude is to be more than talk, we must face the fact that creativity is not found in every tradition. Ours is one of the few creative ones and we must work to re-establish our children's direct contact with that tradition, which is their own, after all. Despite all the changes recent decades have seen, culture is still transmitted primarily through language. The essential works necessary for understanding and transmitting our culture were written in Greek and Latin. Translations are marvelous tools, but no translation can be safely used or taught except by one who knows the original tongue. An educational curriculum founded on Greek and Latin gave us Jefferson and Adams, Burke and Samuel Johnson, not to mention Copernicus and Newton, Luther and Calvin, Michaelangelo and Bach. Educators have developed curricula and texts which can teach these languages on any level from pre-school through college. Most subjects that are important for formative education can be be taught through and with these languages. The materials are out there, lying in the warehouses of the Cambridge and Oxford University Presses. We have in our hands the making of a reactionary revolution of excellence. The questions we must ask ourselves are the following: Do we have the will to give our children their own culture back again? Do we have the courage to restore meaning and creativity to our nation?
Um...
Yassir Arafat, or should I say, Abu Amar is a civil engineer.
Kinda ironic really. Civil engineers are supposed to build things, but all Abu Amar does is bring things down. At least the Israeli Army has helped, and brought his compound down, so maybe he can put his skills to use. ;)
"Physics for Poets
LOL!!
Yes. If it is not a requirement for their graduation, it shouldn't be a requirement of my graduation.
Nothing says that I can't go and take it on my own, but it should not be a requirement for graduation.
Hahaha... that is what a bunch of us engineer students did when we took our social studies courses. Strange thing though, during this 'intellectual war' between the touchy-feely disciplines and hard-science displines, is that the women on our side was always trying to smooth things out, while the men on their side, would occassionally blurt out a point making our argument.
I was glad that some of my English requirements were satisfied by 'Literature of Science Fiction'.
We got to watch movies of science fiction books, read books by science fiction authors, some of which we had already read!
But...but... isn't being able to power whole cities using nothing but solar or wind power alone possible? I mean, if I can read about it or feel that it should be possible, then its you engineers job to do it. [end_sarcasm]
Fundamentally, science is honest, even though it can be honestly mistaken. Seems to me when the gray areas of agenda driven liberal arts education started creeping into the scientific insider newthink, then science became more political than science, although there are far older precedents. Huygens v Newton comes to mind.
Science has always been colored by the internal politics of the peer review process, which required overwhelming empirical evidence followed by logical, rational, supported conclusions to overcome.
With the rush to publish, and the kowtowing to political forces and special interests to gain grant money, rather than gaining support from industry (which seeks a profitable result) or independant patronage, junk science is the predictable result.
The only reason, however, that this becomes the case, is that the majority of liberal arts majors remain fundamentally ignorant of the basic principles of science and mathematics, and thus are easily bamboozled by 'scientific sounding stuff'. If the public will not only swallow the BS, but then demand political action based on the erroneous conclusions thereof, then science, and our species are serious trouble.
A Math or Engineering student would consider the History of Math or History of Science, 'fluff' courses.
A very sweeping statement. I'm quite sure this is true of some scientists, but certainly not all.
Wasn't Hitler a failed writer or a poet?
Of course, yes, of course. As you can see from the responses, this is a real problem in American education. That is the basic issue that Allan Bloom dealt with in his book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students
And there he concedes
Here I am slaving away for a Chemistry B.S, taking some of the most God-awful classes imaginable. I spend 5 hours in a lab, and perhaps 5 writing it up, and get one or two credit hours for it. On the other hand, people get credit for knitting classes!
Incidentally, I have opted for the well-rounded curricula. I am taking a fair number of "fuzzy" classes -- they're easy, they boost the GPA, and they break the monotony of physics... physical chemistry.... inorganic chemistry.... linear algebra.... (P-chem -- kill me now!)
:)
Math majors can get a job ANYWHERE, but it's a dang big job o'work, worth it though.
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but it seems to me that in pure academia there is plenty of funding for research that is easy for the layman to understand.
I was interested in the conversation of "bad scholarship" in science. To give an example, Andrew Wiles is credited for proving the so-called Fermat's Last Theorem. The proof he published was incorrect. It had a "hole".
The hole was quickly plugged and the proof verified. Wiles didn't intend to deceive anyone and was quite upset with himself for the failure, but that would be considered bad scholarship by the writer of the article. In science, bad scholarship is either lost (the aforementioned uncited papers) or debunked. In the humanities, unless the infraction is egregious, it persists. Poor scholarship is simply a part of ethnic studies. It is to be expected in the social sciences. The hard sciences have standards that are rather high.
There's an old joke where a dean is complaining to the head of the physics department about all the scientific equipment that the university has to purchase. "Why can't you be more like the mathematicians?" the dean says, "They only need a pencil, paper and a wastebasket."
"Or the philosophers, who don't need the wastebasket."
Have you considered another major?
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