Like Freedom? Thank A Scientist - How Science Made America Possible

[Ptah]

Like Freedom? Thank A Scientist - How Science Made America Possible


http://networkedblogs.com/2HfyA


Science, outside some in the climate community (*), is anti-authoritarian.
There is no voting to create a consensus in science, no appeals to authority -
science is vulnerable every single day of the year, to experiments, to revisions
and to complete debunking by new generations of scientists who, like gun-slingers
in the Old West, want to make their name taking down the big guys.

Great thinkers like Einstein and Aristotle have been slain by the scientific method
so it can happen to anyone - and that power is what made freedom possible, according
to Timothy Ferris, emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, former
editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and book author.

That's right, you have science to thank for freedom, he claims. The American Revolution?
Scientists and fans of science, he says. Other countries with freedom, like England and Holland,
were leaders in science while 20th century Communist states, like the USSR and China, were spectacular failures.
If you have any sense of history you will put up a hand and note that Germany was hardly a liberal
democracy yet had science success. True, acknowledges Ferris, but Germany benefited from earlier
humanistic values and freedom to conduct science in a collaborative way.

It's not to say that scientists should be running the government - nothing was more ridiculous than a
list of Nobel prizer winners endorsing a Democrat (surprise!) for President - or that governing is a science,
but rather that the qualities that make great science possible make great societies possible.


<snip>


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(*) Astronomy has fallen prey to this silliness as well, as those in the Pluto debate made so plain,
but bold statements don't always make the same sense with multiple examples, so one goes into a footnote.

[drm604]

1. I'm trying to figure out that first sentence.

Is that a slam at climate scientists, or deniers, or... what?

[Ptah]

2. That's not clear to me either.

:shrug:

[caraher]

3. It was a slam

The writer is a right-winger. See, for instance, his piece on the "Baracket" (that's Barack + Rocket), which contains the following:

Harken back to 2006, before Scientific Blogging existed and the only science blogging on the Internet was militant, left-wing atheists telling us how much Republicans hated science because President Bush limited stem cell research to existing lines.

Imagine if George W. Bush had said back then that we don't need to fund human embryonic stem cell research because we are going to fund some future technology that is even better. Or we don't need to implement energy alternatives because we can rely on some future magic science to cure global warming. Would Democrats have cheered? Yet cheer they did, at least about magic future science instead of current science in a recent press conference.

The return to the Moon Bush announced in 2004? Cancelled. It's no surprise. The Democrat War On Science started in 2007 when the newly installed Congressional majority whacked $550 million out of the NASA budget, specifically the Constellation program. Since we are in alternative universe land, imagine if Nixon had come into office as a new Republican in January 1969 and cancelled the Apollo program because it was started by a Democrat and was under-funded and not meeting its target?

Complete with use of "Democrat" as an adjective.

[drm604]

4. That's what I thought

but it wasn't totally clear.

[Ready4Change]

5. Blasphemy!

Don't you know that God created the USA out of whole cloth on day 8? Science had nothing to do with it.

It says so in the first versions of the Constitution, before it was edited by a secret cabal of godless liberal french colonial hippies.