Letters to the Editor
-
Color me published
“How we are going to feed 10 billion people without GM foods is beyond me.”
It has actually been demonstrated that organic farming techniques yield more crops and creates more sustainable soil than using chemically-treated agricultural methods.
What Mr. Dyson completely rejects is the socio-economic forces what will wield these technological wonders. I have heard it all before – in the mid-90’s, through Salon and Wired magazines, all the hoopla and wonder and joyousness at how the internet will change everything, nation-states will become extinct, everyone will have a PhD for free.
Uh–huh. Look around. Presidential voter fraud; k-12 students who can barely do math or find themselves on a map; a news media that gives us Anna Nicole and ignores the Iraq Coaliton Provisional Authority (which, by the way, made it illegal for Iraqi farmers to keep and trade their own seeds, forcing them to purchase GM seeds annually); massive identity theft and security breaches from stolen laptops (have any articles on here mentioned the wonders and utopian vision of Web Services?); people who can’t fly because their names rhyme with “saddam”; the list goes on and on. I am so sick of this clap-trap.
"Surely someone has come up with a nice, sharply cutting label for this intellectual fallacy by now. For some reason this sort of grandiose mis-speaking is becoming more and more common of late."
Blame the book publsihers. With titles like “The God Particle,” is it any wonder we have so much of this?
And can anyone tell me what the hell a “digital age guru” is? It must be nice to sit around and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to say the same things any college freshman on his second bong-hit would come up with.
And “neo-luddite.” I love that!
It’s flowing so high around here, you need a kayak. We’re brown-water rafting.
-
What a charming irrelevant washed out talent!
Not much to add to critiques already posted but perhaps we would do well to consider the case of Lord Kelvin who "spent the first half of his career being right and the second half being wrong" -- Biographer.
He said heavier than air flight was impossible (gee didn't he notice birds?) with words to the effect that "everything is physics, all the rest is stamp collecting" Hey, anyone noticed a similar conceit with Dyson?
Lord K. also set back geology for decades because his calculation of the rate of earth cooling ("everything is physics") could not allow for the old-earth implications of fossil discoveries. Then radioactivity was discovered - whoops.
http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/003169.html
and
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-54/iss-10/p74a.html
plus as many others as one may care to google.
Apparently studying a field 30 years in the past doesn't prepare one to make correct criticisms in the present day.
Duh! :*)
-
For a scientist, Mr Dyson is astonishingly ignorant about polar bears.
They are dependent on the sea ice and the seals they hunt from it. They do NOT like it warmer. This is so ignorant is it actually shocking! And the rest of his discussion re: climate change isn't much better, and shows no science whatsoever.
-
Why in them days... I was knee high to a grasshopper...
Dyson: "Yep... when I was a kid... the model A was still a fine car. And I don't understand why there is all this fuss about me having a phone with a rotary dial. Perfectly good phone. All this new fangled talk about global warming... dagnabbit! God is the only thing that matters. I should know... I ain't gonna be around here in the time that this global warming thing might happen. The solution is trees. When we have burned up all the oil... we can burn wood."
-
My Own Unscientific Predictions
1. Earth will survive the 21st century, no matter what we do. It's a tough old biosphere, it's lived through asteroid impacts.
2. We'll survive too, though certainly changed.
3. The polar bears will survive mostly in zoos.
4. The oil economy will not survive at all.
-
By the way, a great little article on quantum mechanics I'd like to recommend
Evelyn Fox Keller wrote an interesting piece on the difficulties inherent in understanding quantum mechanics in her book "Reflections on Gender and Science." The article is titled "Cognitive Repression in Contemporary Physics."
She argues that questions of interpretation continue to plague the subject of quantum mechanics because physicists have failed to formulate a cognitive paradigm adequate to their theory.
The problem lies in the tension between knowability and objectifiability. This tension equals zero in classical physics. In quantum mechanics, this tension becomes infinite so that knowability and objectifiability can no longer coexist in the same theory.
In the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, one ends up with a universe that is objectifiable -- that is, the observer does not influence the outcome of the observation -- but not knowable -- because you can't use the statistics of the ensemble to extract information about any individual system in the ensemble.
In the Copenhagen picture, one works with an individual system described by a wave function. Through the quantum wave function, you CAN know the state of an individual system. But the wave function is "collapsed" into the measured state by the act of measurement. The act of observation changes the system, so the system is not objectifiable.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, the infinite distance between subject and object one normally assumes to exist in science -- indeed, the distance that allows scientists to consider scientific knowledge "objective" - has been obliterated.
So in quantum mechanics, we can see the universe as knowable but not objectifiable, or objectifiable but not knowable. The universe cannot be both knowable and objectifiable.
So is the universe knowable but not objectifiable, or is it objectifiable but not knowable?
The debate conitnues. Keller argues that this debate continues because physicists, for psychological reasons, are unable to fully relinquish their faith in the classical cognitive paradigms of knowability and objectifiability.
She argues that "the vision implicit in quantum mechanics still awaits representation in a cognitive paradigm yet more radical than any that the conventional interpretations have offered us."
One problem I have with her essay -- she dismisses the "Many Worlds" interpretation out of hand as just plain ridiculous.
So maybe she's the one whose cognitive paradigm is insufficiently radical.