and one more thing, john doe

[John Doe]

Well kinda yeah...this paragraph is much more fair and
accurate than a lot of the dreck others have been
writing...but I would point out that most of the
things you list as the focus of science is really more
the focus of technology....yes you are right that, for
good or bad, much of modern pure science is about
stuff that is not applicable and in fact I would say
downright useless to most folks including me( few
particle physicists would deny that )...but utility
and pragmatism is not what fans my fires, nor was it
even remotely on Newton's mind when he was pondering
gravity...when I use the term, I mean to convey a
notion a of a woman or man who is trying to figure out
a problem, and not concerned about its practical
application...i.e., a guy scribbling on a pad..then
having the scribbles looked at by others...then
deciding whether or not it can be tested..and if so,
then what?...missles, face-lifts,designer drugs,
plasma TVs are all in the province of technology,  not
pure science....and yeah it is not like the old days
of Empedocles or Kepler even...as for better ing the
world, well that depends on the individual
scientist...Sagan certainly was a humanist and
enjoined people and nations to stop the weapons and
pollution shit and make life better dammit!...so was
Bronowski..and recently Gell-Mann, and many
others...but you bet that many many applied scientists
are profiteering and have little conscience...but
again, they are not the kind of scientist I have in
mind; I stick to the guys doing either the "useless"
stuff' like astronomy and particle physics, or
biologists, whose work is either beneficial to the
world ecosystems or else just harmlessly quaint by
most people's standards ( chiroptologists, say, who
want to know how bats modulate their sonar during
flight, JUST because they want to know how bats
manipulate their sonar during flight )...that sort of
pure curiosity, though rare, does exist, and THAT'S
what I have in mind when I use the term science... not
manufacturing sexier Ipods...and again, a guy like
Feynman would be the first to say that,( in a New York
accent by the way ) "hey, I do what I do because I get
a kick out of the discovery process...I want to know
how nature works...and if it turns out there's a nice
, simple equation that can summarize it all in a neat
package, then THAT'S the way it is...if on the other
hand it turns out to be like an onion will millions of
layers to it and we end up just sick and tired of
looking at the layers then THAT'S the way it
is...whatever way Nature turns out to be, we should
not predecide..." and he would as I do agree heartily
that science can only answer certain types of question
to our satisfaction, and we have a lot of questions
important to us like why I like Zep that we may not
care for science to tackle in the first
place....Feynman played the bongo drums and he didn't
care to apply scientific analysis to why he liked to
play them....he just liked it :  )...as for Blake
well..I like to space out as much as the next guy..
.but the problem is, we take for granted how much we
reason like a scientist through the course of a
day...so it's easy for dunderheads to not stop and
think about how in fact they are thinking, and instead
endorse some supposed alternate modality or something
of the Mind...I mean, they talk about such things as
abstractly as they claim science does about everything
else! It's absurd! It's funny how they get all their
skeptical ammunition out to attack science, but never
do it to Eastern Mysticism...like, why not? What's
good for the goose is good for the gander...you seem
to have a much more sensible apprehension of the
problems here than many of the other
contributors...because you can discriminate the
concerns and issues better...


--- Kyle <kybrow at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/10/05, John Doe <tristero69 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > ...science is ultimately more about description
> > than explanation per se anyway...
> >
> 
> Science has kind of evolved to this, though; the
> original role of science
> was to explain the otherwise unexplainable factors
> of the world (lightning,
> earthquakes, etc.), but it is now (as most of our
> questions now have to do
> with previous scientific explanation and how
> accurate it is instead of
> finding new ways of understanding unexplainable
> things; in your words,
> "ultimately more about description") more concerned
> about self-evaluation,
> which has brought about such questioning of the
> method. Science is now
> almost purely self-corrective instead of a 'new
> adventure' so to speak, and,
> on top of that, a lot of modern science isn't that
> applicable, and that
> which is applicable brings about questions such as
> 'do we really need this
> sort of stuff?' Sure, a spedometer is very useful,
> predicting the weather is
> a must, but what about designer drugs? and plasma
> TVs? and things that bring
> people to extremes of self-gratification? (all these
> are more contemporary
> applications). I think that most people are more
> concerned with the fact
> that science does not have a conscience; certainly
> such predispositions
> spoil a scientific experiment. You're right, science
> can't necessarily
> explain why people enjoy listening to Led Zeppelin,
> but (I think a lot of
> people think this way) it doesn't exactly mean that
> such questions are not
> important to us as humans. And many people seem to
> believe that if it isn't
> science it's useless (and thus chain themselves to
> the harshness of reason).
> I think this was what that guy who pulled the Blake
> quote was trying to get
> at, because this is the kind of stuff Blake
> advocated. I'm not disagreeing
> with you, though, because a lot of contemporary
> science does end up bringing
> about unarguable beneficial fruits, such as
> DNA-altered crops that bear much
> more food. But the problem is, science is now more
> about "competition" and
> thus not about bettering the world.
> 
> --
> -kyle b
> 


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