The alien hypothesis?

[John Doe]

Yeah he was pretty much right on with the Trigger
Effect!...Burke's very perspicacious and erudite
without being mawkish or presumptuous...yeah Feynman
was a trip...I have the Nova episode called "The Last
Journey of a Genius" about his obsession with getting
to Tuva..it's a hoot!...I have the lectures on
electricty and magnetism on tape...the sound qulaity
is not all that good though...but his New York accent
is always fun to hear even if I can't make out if he
said "capacity" or "capacitor"...the meaning can still
be glorked from rontexl..

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

> 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
> 
> 
> 



	
		
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