Guarding the Wall: tunnels, bridges and tendrils

[alice wellintown]

So, the influence of modern science is incalculable, as it has merged with
industry and business, excerted its force on education, organized every
human field, studied, form its truth claims (even if these are only cult
truths that the population assumes), every spec of human life, and most
insidiously, merged with technology.  In the war industry and business
there is no difference between the scientist and the engineer who applies
science, the equipment, the the equipment, the equipment. Science wants
money as does engineering, to buy technology, not to gain knowledge, but
practical utility, science has not so much divorced itself from art to form
two cultures but has merged itself with technology to engineering, and this
was done with the bomb project that now is the model of science in every
field. The slope that they slipped on was the calin to truth and its
benefits, that man's desire to know, as Aristotle explained in the Ethics,
was always to the Good. The War made of science a patriot, a secret
society, a brain-trust, a funded spy network. The loss of risk in the
field, the brave scientist who does research at great risk, the spontanious
and the flexible, the scientist more like the carpenter than the
technician, was lost.


On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 2:47 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> So the carpenter, with an eye to take measure, a rule of thumb, cuts studs
> to blocks, then shaves or shims them in place, the hammer an extension of
> the arm is a flexible tool, its business end may be reversed as the skilled
> craftsman wields it, so that its head and claw and handle, every inch of it
> is put to use by a master.
>
> So the scientist in the field, must be skilled and brave, must eye and
> take measure; not in a lab of calibrated certainties, but in a dynamic and
> dangerous environment where failure is real, where the fashioning of tools
> is genius.
>
> So not the scientist of modernity who is educated out of risk, who sends
> prefabricated blocks to the carpenter, a nail-machine, an efficiency and
> budget report to his industrial and business partners.
>
>
>
> On Sunday, April 21, 2013, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>> > The rule of thumb is a powerful method of ordinary men and women, but
>> the scientist would dismiss it as feeble minded or superstitious, not
>> scientific.****
>>
>> Not just wrong; *hilariously *wrong. Keep it up!****
>>
>> ** **
>>
>
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