The alien hypothesis?

[Blake Stacey]

Quoting John Doe <tristero69 at yahoo.com>:

> 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....
>

Amen to that, Mr. Doe!  I have also read the Gleick biography, as well 
as **Most
of the Good Stuff**, **The Character of Physical Law**, the Lectures on 
Physics,
Computation and Gravitation.  I'm still missing a few of the more specialized
volumes like **Photon-Hadron Interactions**, but hey, I'm a finite 
human being,
and my home bookshelf is not the Library of Babel.  I've seen a fair number of
Feynman videos, too:  every winter break at MIT, they project Feynman films in
one of the big lecture halls.  It's a great way to warm up and forget the
metric f*ckload of snow falling outside.  In addition to the 
documentaries like
**The Quest for Tannu Tuva**, they also show the Cornell Messenger lectures
which were edited into **The Character of Physical Law**.  Grand stuff.

If you can ever get your hands on a copy of the **Tiny Machines** video, it's
entirely worthwhile to see.  Not only does Feynman lay out his ideas on
nanotechnology, but he also addresses the relation between science and 
art. The questions from the audience (he gave the speech at the Esalen 
Institute)
are, in a word, priceless.

And, of course, I grew up on a steady James Burke diet, so any time I 
talk about
science history, I probably have more Burkesian intonations than I 
could count. What he said in "The Trigger Effect" about viewing 
technology as a network is
turning into a mathematically solid science (starting with A. L. Barabasi's
1995 paper on scale-free networks).  See, e.g., Yaneer Bar-Yam's **Dynamics of
Complex Systems**, http://www.necsi.org/publications/dcs/index.html.

Blake