Letters to the Editor
-
@MacK -
"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.)"
You're right that physics is very mathematical, I took the physics undergrad route and still keep up to date on the field.
But physics isn't about math, the math must be verified by reality. Dyson is not a typical first-rate physicist, I'm not even sure he would be considered first-rate.
I disagree that quantum philosophy bores physicists at all. The real nature of the world is the question that drives fundamental research. Physics used to be called "natural philosophy," and current practitioners still philosophize freely. And the leading philosophies of quantum physics are not "BS." They may be viewed as naive in the future, but they're all perfectly good attempts at making some sense of an apparently contradictory reality.
I'm certainly not a "we must all wear sackcloth" anti-technologist, but Dyson's hand-waving invocation of unspecified technological miracle cures isn't the mark of a real thinker, it's emotionally driven denial of a real problem.
( personally, my dream/hope is cheap fusion power applied to environmental cleanup and carbon sequestration. )
-
Re: Color me published
"It has actually been demonstrated that organic farming techniques yield more crops and creates more sustainable soil than using chemically-treated agricultural methods."
It has actually been demonstrated that letter writers that make blind faith assertions without giving a source for the information are correct 78.3% of the time. No really, I saw it on some blog somewhere!
-
Surely you are joking Mr.
Dyson. I think the most notable comment here is that Feynman is missed. He understood so much and could put it all to practical use. And he had a sense of humor!
-
interesting bunch of posts! i'd like to comment on a few
Emyth(4) writes a brilliant essay - i'll copy the last para, "But now that I think about it, it's worse than annoying... The certainty with which these so-called experts make their pronouncements is seductive to those who don't know better. It's confusing to those who are trying to figure and find their way. And it is really reprehensible for those who do this sort of thing are not true scholars and authorities; they obviously have very personal, private reasons for spouting-off." But i'd like to devil's advocate a quote by Dyson, "It is better to be wrong than to be vague" - Freeman Dyson. she(?) compares that with a map, where it is MUCH better to be vague than wrong. dyson is all hypothetical, a hypothetical scientist, a hypothetical christian, a hypothetical humanist. he deals in hypotheticals. and just being hypothetical, it is better to be specific in order to be falsifiable (cribbed from Popper, as paradigm was from kuhn - he speaks in populist scio-jargon). he thinks he's being creative.
i might as well say it here. i do not like dyson, like Greg in FL(1), to me, dyson has no heart. everywhere he can he makes snide remarks about jews (my THING, everyone here knows it! but it served my family well, seeing monsters under every bed, we escaped in the nick of time) every chance he gets, thinking his superior (british) intelligence will go above the heads of the peasants every time. "I suppose I'm a better Jew than I am a Christian." very funny. back to reality.
MacK.(4) your second paragraph left me just shaking my head - you're supposed to AGREE with attractive girls! but then, you charmingly self-deprecate with "As you can tell I did not get laid a lot in college". but when people see "Norman Borlaug" (the Green Revolution) they think "Glenn Seaborg" (plutonium) and they have a point.
Tom Sawyer(5), that "consciousness of a civilization", as you call it, might, as havel says, decide, "Too Many People!"
walter_map(5) talks about dyson's academic qualifications. i remember dyson's "Ecce homo" statement - "it's remarkable to me that a primate could do partial differential equations" - well partial differential equations are HARD as any one who's ever done them knows, but their solving has nothing to do with intelligence, just procedure. you wonder if he actually *did* them or just picked up the term as a layman might. they are cut and dried engineering, like architectural calculations. when i was in high school (40 years ago, *calculus* was spoken of with awe, now it's *done* in high school and next generation, something done by Mathematica on the computer)
-
This guy is off the hook and you give him space?
Science is separate from philosophy?
The two are in thoroughly intertwined in fact and through history!
You can use the scientific method (Freeman dismisses this as a 'box of tricks' that he 'likes to play with') to study religion, save for the logical conundrums that the religious use to hide their wizards of oz, but the reverse is NOT true!
This column would have been funner if you'd had Bill O'Reilly and Dann Coulter do a 'science' interview.
Sad to see you go here...
-
Denial is not just a river in Egypt
Dyson is one of those pseudo-scientists who doubt and deny everything they don't understand and everything that will not be full understood during their lifetime. There are many of is ilk who dismiss Super-String Theory because they don't understand the mathematics involved, and because a number of mathematical concepts will actually have to be developed in order to test SST before it can't be verified or rejected mathematically. Dyson knows that he will very likely be dead when the catastrophic consequences of climate change hit is, so he just doesn't care. In the meantime, he enjoys being hailed as a contrarien by global warming deniers. He is also applying blatant deception when he claims that the population of polar bears is actually increasing, nothing could be further from the truth. Richard Dawkins has blown him out of the water intellectually and disproved every single one of his bizarre theories about climate change and religion, so he's mad at him.
-
Not so rosy future, according to reality
I hate to sound all Hippy-Dippy, but the older I get, the more obvious it becomes to me that there is a carefully worked out balance in the natural world that simply can't be ignored. Balance, there is a balance. As Dyson might understand it better, there is an equal sign in the middle of all things. What is done on one side of that equal sign will change the result on the other side.
We remove the predators from an ecosystem, their prey increase and eat all the young aspen trees destined to shade the stream bed; the water heats up, fish have a hard time and begin to die off.
Farmers demand water to be siphoned off for their crops, there is not enough water to flush young fish down into the ocean; a couple of years later, the fishing industry falls into decline; it's barely worth it, for some fishermen, to gas up their boats.
These are two simplified examples, but I think they make the point. Dyson sees a world where humans can live and behave in any manner they like, do anything they want on their side of the equation because it either has no effect on the other side, or if it did, what happens on the other side doesn't mean much anyway. Even if we screw things up on the other side, and ecosystems fall into collapse, what do we care? We can always whip out our gene-splicing kits and conjure up some plant or animal that poops gasoline Flippity Doo!
What a horrible world he postulates. Horrible and horrifying. Who wants to life in genetic-splice world with 100 billion people? I don't, even if I believed it was possible. Climate change is effecting an enormously complex equation, and I think we could see ripple effects on the other side that we can't even begin to imagine yet, wreaking biological, sociological, and economic changes at a rate that will leave us breathless in our attempts to keep up. And really, for what? Why is the idea that we should try to reduce our footprint on the planet so laughable and abhorrent? What is the downside to that lifestyle?