Letters to the Editor

• I like Dyson -- always have

  [Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  And frankly, whenever I have heard Al Gore pontificate about a field I have some expertise in, I cringe at the howling generalisations and inaccuracies and general horseshit he comes out with. Someone on his staff when he was VP once told me that the problem was that Gore had gone to St Albans and debated there, where everyone made their arguments from 5x4 cue cards and being briliant involved being able to discourse convincingly even if wrong -- Gore is notorious for not hearing the whole issue through and just grabbing a bit of the concept to suit himself. He may be right a lot of the time, and I share a lot of his politics, but gawd, when he is wrong he is soooo wrong and sooo pompous about it. He does use dubious evidence to support arguments where he is right as well, and that really hurts his position when the dubious evidence is used to tear down his position as a whole.

  Much of the criticism of Dyson seems to come from the neo-luddite wing of the green lobby, the "we must all wear sackcloth" gang. It reminds me of when in my callow youth, a very attractive girl was introduced to me in my college, in front square. She asked what my subject was and when I replied Physics she launched into a long denunciation of the subject and our presumed desire to build nuclear power stations and other tech. I inquired as to the nature of her concern and she continued to spout points which, well, had no basis. After a little pressing she finally stated nuclear power was a technology that few people understood and we should therefore not use it. I asked her did that means that that "we should not rely on any technology she did not understand" . . . it was at this point I notices that her bicycle chain had come off .. I asked her if she knew how to put it back on . . . "she said no, could you?" to which I replied "I think you should give up cycling. . . " As you can tell I did not get laid a lot in college.

  So lets look at a few of the critics commenting here . . say Slackie Onasis: "invariably favoring highly technological "miracle solutions" to complex problems that point to an ever less natural, more precarious existence for human beings, with the magic of new discoveries held out as a tempting prize -- "people won't have to change; we'll change the world, instead!" -- it's the slogan of the carnival barker and the charlatan, the false prophet, the snake oil salesman. The payoff never matches the product pitch"

  Who is the carnival pitchman here Slackie? Seems to me that for example Norman Borlaug (look him up) and his colleagues indeed pulled off a miracle technological solution, that led to a less precarious solution for human beings based on the magic of new discoveries. I could list more, but you just laid out some glib sloganeering that cannot stand up to any rational testing.

  Robotball "This guy does not sound like any scientist I know, a perfect example of why mushy headed physicists should stay the hell away from biology." Are you having anything to do with modern biochemistry or genetics -- Robotball, I have news for you, both subjects have been shaken up by the injection of hard physics, especially modeling taken from, of all things, nuclear physics. Seems to me the real biologists are welcoming the physicists with open arms, while pseudo-scientists with liberal arts backgrounds want to call everyone else mushy headed in an act of Freudian projection.

  Grubert: "Dyson's work seems to be mostly mathematical ruminations, like unification of mathematically equivalent representations (similar to the unification of the Shroedenger's quantum differential equation with the matrix interpretation. was that Dirac? I forget. )" Actually it was Heisenberg, Pauli, Born and Jordan mostly -- and Matrix mechanics matters because it allowed people to use Schroedingers wave mechanics more effectively, an especially to do work on computers modeling quantum mechanics. And the thing is Grubert, Physics is mostly maths -- and Dyson is right about all the BS philosophizing that surrounds quantum mechanics, it is mostly ruminations from those who do not understand it, of that it is just a mathematical representation -- and it bores the lving shit out of most physicists (though these days I'm a lawyer.)

  I may not agree with Dyson, but he has always been an iconoclast and it is hilarious to watch him get the backs up of so many "right thinking" people who kid themselves into thinking they have edgy views.

  Permalink Saturday, September 29, 2007 03:45 AM