The alien hypothesis?

[John Doe]

Yup...no question about it; Empire Building is the
common consequence of getting bloated on grants and
eminence in an institution...James Burke generally
knew what he was talking about...but I guess my
problem is, and I freely admit it, that when I think
of a scientist, in terms of temperamnet, values,
disposition, etc, I tend to have in mind Richard
Feynman...I have read his biography by Gleick, have
nearly all his published works ( or more accuratley,
works published, even written, by others OF his stuff
), and he embodies what I have in mind when I argue
with Theory-heads....and I grant that he was somewhat,
though not entirely, an exception to many of the
pernicious aspects of science that these people
probably have in mind when they complain about its
results or criticize its audacity...maybe if they
read, say, the Character of Physical Law, they would
get a better idea of what scientists really think
about what they do....

--- Blake Stacey <blake.stacey at ens-lyon.fr> wrote:

> Quoting John Doe <tristero69 at yahoo.com>:
> 
> > My point about funding , I believe, stressed the
> same
> > point you just reiterated - the majority is done
> under
> > institutional auspices...but... original ideas
> arise
> > unbidden by bucks, and no I don't believe all the
> > subscribers to this "site" understand the
> difference
> > between thinking up ideas vs. executing them and
> then
> > marketing them...many mathematicians still work
> this
> > old-fashioned way...and Frank Drake by the way,
> was
> > not being paid per se to develop the Drake
> > Equation...Ihe did it out of passion and
> > curiosity...there are plenty of mavericks...it's
> just
> > that the great bulk of them never make the Big
> > Contract...that's the way it's always been...
> 
> Don't forget the effect of "institutionalization". 
> Often, professors go into
> "empire-building" as they get older, learning the
> tricks to pile up 
> grant money
> for themselves, their close colleagues and their
> students.  Work might
> originally get funded because it has direct military
> applications (e.g.,
> radar).  However, once the mechanisms for
> distributing funds are in place,
> bureaucratic inertia tends to resist change, and
> money -- even federal 
> money --
> just keeps flowing, regardless of the applications
> it meets in the end.
> 
> This is a special case of the general phenomenon
> James Burke called "the
> institutionalization of change".  When some social
> device works, we tend to
> protect it by turning it into a ritual or an
> "institution".  For example,
> representative democracy got invented in ancient
> Athens, in an era when only a
> few could reach the capital to speak for the many,
> and we still use 
> most of its
> forms today, even though Athenian democracy's
> initial causes are now 
> moot.  This
> tendency to ritualize leads to an odd effect when
> societies learn they can
> benefit from technological change, i.e., from
> scientific advances:  the
> scientific process, the process of making "tomorrow
> better than today", 
> becomes
> itself an institution.  And there you have the birth
> of MIT, Bell Labs, etc.,
> etc.  Even though the very nature of the scientific
> method means that we will
> have to un-learn facts our forefathers once
> accepted, and even though applying
> new science to make new technology means tomorrow
> **will** be different than
> today, we have entrenched bureaucracies built to
> enshrine and safeguard this
> process.
> 
> To take a more specific example, I did my thesis
> with lab equipment and 
> computer
> time paid for by the Department of Energy and the
> Department of Defense, even
> though my thesis covered the entropy of
> electron-swarm motion in weakly 
> ionized
> gases and the use of genetic algorithms to extract
> scattering cross 
> sections --
> a subject, I assure you, of negligible military or
> anti-terrorist potential.
> 
> 
> > I
> > personally do not believe we have ever been
> > "visited"...for many reasons...but I think CETI is
> a
> > noble endeavor, and for what it MAY "return" on
> our
> > investment, it's a bargain; the funding is peanuts
> > compared to the sensless waste on military antics
> > which cost lives, among other things..
> >
> 
> "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent
> life exists 
> elsewhere in the
> universe is that none of it has tried to contact
> us."
> --Bill Watterson, **The Indispensable Calvin and
> Hobbes**, p. 158
> 
> 
> 
> 



	
		
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