Letters to the Editor
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um
The numbers of bears in the Arctic are increasing rather than decreasing.
Except, you know, not:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/06/AR2005070601899.html
Just because somebody smart says something, doesn't mean the data support it.
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Three Big Cheers for Freeman
Based on my readings of publications such as Scientific American and Discovery magazine, it seems to me that science is going through a bit of nihilistic temper tantrum at the moment
So three big cheers for Freeman Dyson for reasserting the importance of theology, the inherent optimism of rationalism and the silliness of the climate change hysteria.
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So larry333, you think it's acceptable to call hundreds of professional scientists corrupt frauds?
So three big cheers for Freeman Dyson for reasserting the importance of theology, the inherent optimism of rationalism and the silliness of the climate change hysteria.
He's calling hundreds of professional scientists frauds when he says that climate change science is politically corrupted.
I challenge Freeman to call out these scientists by name and accuse each them of fraud by name, so that each and every one of them can take him to court and sue him for slander and defamation of character.
Be a man, Freeman. Don't be a coward.
If you think climate scientists are committing fraud for political reasons, then name the ones you're accusing of fraud and let's see if your accusations can survive in a court of law.
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An accusation of scientific fraud will certainly make a case of slander
If you accuse a scientist of fraud, then that accusation threatens the ability of the scientist to make a living.
I think climate scientists should start calling Dyson out on his mass slander of their field.
Name names, Freeman, so the individuals you name will have a fair chance to defend their reputations as scientists from your accusations of fraud.
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Here's a question I'd really like to ask him
If science is not about deep thoughts, then why was the Schwinger-Dyson equation worth paying you to write?
Why have people been paying you, if nothing you've done has ever really meant anything deep?
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Silenced, you didn't respond to my compliment
so i got miffed - she(?)[you called some scientists "probably men"]probably thinks i'm a troll like those others do. but i got over it - and seeing you cite Schwinger-Dyson so many times i thought i'd refer you to another post i read. (i'm trying it with blockquote thanks "SusanMc" it worked!)
The ugly fact is...
that Dyson became famous writing papers in the period 1947-48 on Feynman's ideas, which Feynman was reluctant to publish. Dyson, being an elegant mathematical physicist, produced some elegant work that was, initially, much easier for fellow physicists to use than the complex muck that Julian Schwinger was producing at Harvard on quantum electrodynamics, and would be replaced by the Feynman Diagram technique after about 1950. Dyson was able to parlay these few, well-written and formally elegant papers and his impeccable English manners along with the cultivation of that uber-snob Oppenheimer into a sinecure at the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton which he held for 50 years. Dyson's entire reputation rests largely on those papers, a few nutty ideas (Dyson Spheres et al.) and the prestige of his position at Princeton, plus having an airy writing style, a big mouth, and a megaphone at the NY Review of Books. He is five decades past his intellectual prime and a blowhard to boot.
His intellectual curiosity can be summed up in an observation he made reviewing a bio of Teller in the NYRB: he had worked on a panel with Teller for a few weeks in 1959 and found him a very pleasant chap and a good physicist, so the bio that showed him to be a right-wing weasel and an intellectual charlatan (he had stolen the key insights that made an H-bomb feasible from another scientist then used government secrecy to hide that fact for years) must be wrong! You see, Dyson had met Teller once, and since HIS impression was different, how could this guy who had spent years researching the man be right! What an asshole.
-- James Levy
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@silenced/david sugarman
Wow, I loved Silenced post on page 7, and am going to research it's recommendation.
Then, I laughed out loud when I read David Sugarman's later comment about her fine mind (I agree!) and confusion about the determined/usual singular issue posts of this particular writer.
I quite like this thread. Like many, I miss Feynman....he was a mensch (agree with Sugarman, again). I wish I could have met him.
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thanks AnnieW
the url i got from wiki is http://www.womenwriters.net/archives/whittoned1.htm which is white on black but if you Control-A you can get it to be black on white - or, if you then click somewhere else, like the url, it goes to white on gray which doesn't kill your eyes so much (why do they DO this?). it's pretty daunting - judging not only by the title but by Silenced explanation, but if i am in the mood to challenge my brain i might try it.
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Global warming isn't the future
It's here now in Alaska. Villages falling into the ocean because the coastlines on which they've been located for hundreds, or thousands of years, are no longer protected by frozen permafrost or the long-gone ice pack; roads buckling and houses slumping into the ground in Fairbanks because of the rapidly thawing permafrost; experienced and sober Native hunters drowning after falling through ice that has long been used for travel; warm-weather parasites devastating Yukon River salmon; bizarre wildfire activity, including a still-burning 200,000-plus acre tundra fire on the North Slope, the biggest on record by far.
This isn't something that may or may not happen at some future date. It is happening NOW.
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Warming Trey
Weather where you are. Will you live to be 100? Ronald McDonald is taking names and kicking @ss.
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Why it matters that science is about deep thoughts
Take electricity and magnetism. Until the 19th century, these were regarded as separate physica phenomena. It was only the search for a deeper thought that motivated physicists of that time to search for a connection between the two.
Eventually the search was a success. Maxwell was able to write down mathematical rquations that described both electricity and magnetism as the two intertwined halves of a single unified theory of electromagnetism.
One class of solutions to those equations consist of waves that travel at the speed of light. That's how radio waves were first discovered. Soon after that, wireless communication was born.
Radio and TV were born out of a deep thought, not out of a bag of tricks. It was a deep thought that there could be a single mathematical framework for two seemingly different physical phenomena. That deep thought determined who were are today.