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How To Make Science Popular Again?
Ars Technica has an interesting look at the recent book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, a collaboration between Chris Mooney, writer and author of The Republican War on Science, and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum. While it seems the book's substance is somewhat lacking it raises an interesting point; how can science be better integrated with mainstream culture for greater understanding and acceptance? "We must all rally toward a single goal: without sacrificing the growth of knowledge or scientific innovation, we must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America's citizenry. We recognize there are many heroes out there already toiling toward this end and launching promising initiatives, ranging from the Year of Science to the World Science Festival to ScienceDebate. But what we need — and currently lack — is the systematic acceptance of the idea that these actions are integral parts of the job description of scientists themselves. Not just their delegates, or surrogates, in the media or the classrooms."
Become Neil Degrasse Tyson's facebook friend. He's making science interesting again, especially with Nova Science Nows profiles on science. If science oriented kids knew there a lot of people like them, they'd be more likely to pursue it as a career.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/cosmic/
Christianity demands reason being left at the door. There are some things you just don't question. Period. The bible is true - period. The world is 6000 years old - period.
And you're wrong. Period. The percentage of overall Christian sects which are biblical fundamentalists is small. And I'm not even including the non-fundie Roman Catholicism, which is the largest Christian denomination by far.
But don't let the truth stand in the way of your bigotry.
http://libwww.freelibrary.org/closing/
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http://www.gallup.com/poll/14107/Third-Americans-Say-Evidence-Has-Supported-Darwins-Evolution-Theory.aspx
The poll shows that almost half of the U.S. population believes that human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God -- as stated in the Bible -- essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago...
A segmentation of Americans based on their responses to the questions about creationism and biblical literacy finds that a quarter of Americans can be considered to be true literalists -- believing not only in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but also in the creationist view of the origin of humans.
Of course you don't believe there are many creationists out there, because you're not a creationist. I have trouble imagining how many people accept this ridiculous idea myself. But there the numbers are.
I believe that Science (like many other things) has been hi-jacked by politics.
It has been hijacked by dump people. If I turn on TV right now and switch to Discovery Ill probably see LA Ink, Most Haunted or other REALITY TV crap :(
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Horseshit. You've been drinking Feyerabend's Kool aid too much.
Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus alone was enough to disprove the Ptolemic system , or at the very least, cause it to be modified into something like the Tychonic system. Once Jupiter's moons had been observed, another pillar of the Ptolemic and indeed human thought had been broken. There are celestial bodies that can orbit other celestial bodies. Boom. Blown, out of the water. The rest was just maths. The main work had already been done.
There were fuck all serious objections to be overcome. The Ptolemic system hadn't a leg to stand on. This wasn't even the first time a Heliocentric model had been proposed. The only thing holding it up was tradition and deference to the church (who employed too many astronomers). Keeping the whole rotten structure aloft required torturous, torturous intellectual atrocities like the Tychonic model. You didn't have to be an astronomer to see what was going on, even in those days.
The Copernican system was published in 1543. In 1609 Kepler dropped the intellectual equivalent of the atomic bomb in the form of his first two laws of planetary motion in the Astronomia Nova. That's 66 years, not 200. Unless you want to include the publishing for the third law in 1619. That gives you 76 years. The Ptolmeic system toppled before Galileo was even....
Holy Presentation Order Batman!! Turns out Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy in 1633, a full 24 years after Kepler published his laws of motion for planets. What a kick in the balls. Not only did his theory have observational evidence, but it even had scientific data backing it up. Pity those churchmen were so keen on reason and justice in their verdicts, eh? Oh well, at least they didn't, you know, burn him at the stake or anything. No, they were far too enlightened for anything like that.
Yeah, maybe Galileo was a bit of a jerk. Kind of like how I'm being a bit of a jerk right now. But that doesn't change the fact that he was scientifically and ethically justified both his heliocentric theories and methods, and that the church was a dogmatic, intolerant and tyrannical censor, prepared to use any means to stifle progress it saw as unfit. And it also doesn't change the fact that both Feyerabend and yourself are gross historical revisionists with an axe to grind against the honest and correct assessment of what happened to Galileo and its meaning for the interface of science, religion and politics.
Stellar parallax....? Some people spend too much time on Wikipedia.
May the Maths Be with you!