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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."
As much as many people would like to think otherwise, public policy is set by elected officials who may take science into consideration, but also must consider economic trade offs and cultural issues. Throw in the usual paranoid claptrap about corporations if you want, it doesn't change the facts.
Just because the Republicans did not rush headlong and unquestionably into the public policy positions championed by the James Hansons and Al Gores of the world doesn't mean they were conducting a war on science.
If science is unpopular today it is because of the arrogant, dogmatic and privileged folks who stand at its door. Add to that the people who embark on regular crusades, telling people they are stupid and ignorant for not listening to them, it's no wonder students shy away from science.
From TFA:
From quotes on websites to a joke by Stephen Colbert, they offer anecdotes about how the public was against the IAUâ(TM)s (International Astronomical Union) decision to remove Pluto from the list of planets, leading the authors to call the situation a âoeplanetary crack-upâ and then ask, âoeDidnâ(TM)t the scientists involved foresee such a public outcry?â Well, if the scientists did foresee an outcry, then what? Should they conduct a public vote next time?
Mooney and Kirshenbaum barely mention any of the scientific bases for the IAUâ(TM)s decision. Instead, they present the case as if the astronomers chose to reclassify Pluto on an inexplicable whim, and it makes one question whether or not the authors looked into any of the actual science for themselves.
I think it's pretty well established that the goal should not be to fit science into pop-culture, at least not if we want it to remain correct and relevent. Your average citizen doesn't care that pluto is only the first discovered Kuiper Belt object, they care that they learned it was a planet when they were a kid. That isn't thinking scientifically. There is no way to make the decision popular without compromising on proper science.
It's not an easy problem to fix. It seems to me like it requires you to teach people to care about science, rather than making science into something people care about. It wasn't that long ago when Bill Nye was getting kids interested in more pure science. Now about the best we have is Mythbusters, which certainly piques curiosity, although it has to resort to explosions and skipping most of the steps in the scientific method to make it palatable. They even have a "warning" for science content, which is a bad sign (tongue-in-cheek or not). Maybe we could get back to that, but it seems the prevailing momentum is toward smaller tidbits and shallower topics.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Science's irrelevance is some of the long-time-in-coming consequences of a society that emphasizes short-term, extremely self-interested value system with a repudiation of the notion of social plurality.
Unless they adapt by supporting cavemen and women riding dinosaurs or hitching a ride on some other demagogue, Science remains irrelevant.
After all, I don't benefit from science in any special way. Where's my flying car so I (alone) can leave the unwashed masses on the ground. How about my super-smart pill so only my children and I don't have to work very hard?
I mean c'mon... This science thing is bunk unless I alone profit at the expense of everyone else.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Naked girls. Guys would flock to science if there wers lots of naked girls.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
a big part of the problem I suspect is that people don't get to do much science around the house or at school. I suspect that if they were actually allowed/encouraged to do so you would see a rapid increase in the public's interest in science. unfortunately, DIY science has been under attack for quite some time in the home and in the school system its self. mostly in the name of safety... The proper response to safety concerns would be to educate the public on relevant safety practices rather than ban or severely limit scientific experimentation by the public. It would also help to show how the sciences are relevant to everyone's every day lives. Much of the reason the public's interest in the sciences is lower than it could be is that they do not see why knowing basic science is useful to them. It has to be more expansive than "because it will create jobs" which it will certainly but the immediate impact of the sciences must be emphasized.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Speaking as a European, actually science is pretty popular in the USA, globally (except for the mad handful who think science is the sworn enemy of their faith). Actually, I quite like to think of the USA as the country of nerds. Case in point, that's where all the Europeans nerds want to go cause since some time around the 1930s that's where all the big science and engineering are. In Europe (UK excluded, too much of an American satellite to be representative) we don't make offerings to the holy ghost of Charles Darwin, and we couldn't care less about science fiction (seriously, we care nowhere near as much as people in the USA do). But we're better at mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, because secondary education didn't fail us. It's not a cultural problem, it's all an educational one.
The problem is not how "popular" or "cool" it is, the problem is with education. To put it simply and bluntly, your educational system sucks, particularly when it comes to science. Reform it. Education is pretty much the same problem for anyone, you're doing it wrong, look at how others are doing it right.
An obvious rift exists between many religious and scientific communities.
Yep, and there shouldn't be one. Science and faith aren't incompatible, some great men of science were also men of faith. But in America more than anywhere else it was turned into an epic science vs faith war where everybody picks a side and the battlefronts are shit that no one would normally care about, like biology and genetics or palaeontology or even palaeoclimatology.
Also, why the hell can't I post this comment? It says "There was an unknown error in the submission.". It seems Slashdot is crumbling to pieces day after day.
You just got troll'd!
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/
If you're truly trying to integrate science with "mainstream culture", a big part of the overlap is in engineering. Science for the sake of scientific knowledge is great, but we've found that it's often easier to connect to people by looking at how science connects with their lives, which often falls into the realm of engineering (or medicine). We have tried to do that with our free educational electronics videos.
Even as science and medicine and gadgetry continue to advance, it's important to make it accessible and exciting to those outside the field. But while the original book being reviewed argues that "the scientists themslves" must take up the lead in educating the public, the fact is that making these subjects accessible has its own set of required skills that are not necessarily the same as those needed for being an excellent scientist. Some will be able to do both, but it's not for everyone.
For public school situations take that damn football money and use it for science classes.
2nd Hire decent teachers that actually enjoy learning and teaching.
3rd Encourage questions. Ask the students questions, and then wait for a response. Let them actually think! Have some actual communication.
Optional: go places! Take students to new environments to get them to think outside of the box. Science is awesome, you don't have to dress it up to make it fun!
All else fails: Blow shit up! Then explain why it blew up!
If you're going to be an evangelist for science, there are a lot of potential pitfalls. I personally was almost turned off science by the half-assed philosophy that many scientists seem to implicitly hold.
For people on the borderline---who might've accepted a scientific worldview but ultimately rejected it---anecdotally the biggest factor I've found is a feeling that accepting the scientific worldview is nihilistic. Usually this seems (again, anecdotally), to be a result of some particularly overreaching attempts to use science as a sort of naive-reductionist philosophy, where every discovery of mechanisms delegitimizes higher-level things, because now they're "only X", and in some sense don't "really" exist anymore. People particularly object to this with humans. Arguments like "X is just brain chemicals" or "Y is just evolved behavior" get thrown around, and you ultimately end up at claims like: "You don't really love her; that's just brain chemicals". "There isn't really any such thing as morality; that's just evolved group behavior". And people generally recoil at and reject that view, if you're implying that actually nothing about human existence is "real".
Of course, nothing in science actually demands that sort of explanation at a philosophical level. Nobody argues that since chemistry is "just physics", it's therefore in any sense not real or illegitimate. It's a perfectly correct way of explaining, at a particular level of description, how the universe works, and chemical properties are real properties, that really do exist. The fact that chemical properties are due to lower-level interactions doesn't change that. Daniel Dennett even coined a term for some of these kinds of philosophical misuse of science: greedy reductionism.
Fortunately, I was saved from that by some more philosophically sophisticated scientists who pointed out to me that the views held by people who study physicalist explanations of the world are much better thought out. And on, say, what the mind "really" is, fully defended physicalist accounts of mind don't have the same greedy-reductionism that characterizes the rather questionable comments of a lot of neuroscientists.
Sure, there are all sorts of other problems, like fundamentalist Christians who won't ever accept any explanation not derived from the Bible. But as a scientist, I tend to think some outreach is better than just attacking them: there's plenty I might change about their organizations, but I can't, so what can I change about mine? Simply being more accurate about the philosophical implications of science, I find, helps to dispel a lot of unnecessary worries, while having the added benefit of actually being, well, more accurate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As you can tell, I think this article touches on a very serious problem. Sagan said it best:
If each schools Academic Decathlon team got the same amount of exposure as the high school football team did then you would see a lot more interest in academics from the general population.
My senior year our Academic Decathlon team made it to the national conference in Chicago. I heard that we placed in the top 10 in each category, but I never did see a single thing about it in our local paper. And this was a small rural school.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I think you're a troll, but I'll bite anyway. As someone who is fascinated with all things science related, I bemoan the total apathy towards science within the community. However, I feel that it is important to point out that it is not just science that is being neglected by the community; politics, philosophy, social conscience and other highly important fields have also been totally lost to the common mind.
It's not just discussing the latest article in Nature magazine or Scientific American that results in dumb stares, but also trying to discuss things like the relative merits of current geopolitical policies of various nations, how and why the legal system has gotten to its current state, even this very subject, the apathy of the common person, is not the sort of thing that most people are able to discuss in any depth.
This may all sound very high-horsey, however, I challenge anyone to go to a party, bring up a discussion about the question of whether mathematics is invented or discovered, and see how long you can keep it up. I'm likely to get laughed at for the mere suggestion of this, someone will call me a dork or similar.
The thing is, I actually get out a lot. I travel several times a year, and spent a lot of time meeting new people. It's something that I really enjoy. I'm not a dork. I think.
So, how do we make science (and other "intelligent" subjects) popular again? I dunno, how about priming children in an environment that's a bit more stimulating than the modern day care facility. How about teaching them the basics in an environment that's a bit more positive than the jokes that are primary schools where teachers' hearts are rarely in the job. Don't even let me get started on the barbaric mass-cagefight that is high school.
You want to know why science is not popular in the first place? Because we (as a society, we can't just blame the "education system", after all, parents, they're YOUR kids) as a society are teaching our kids to be consumerist, apathetic, self-centered brats. We need a whole new social order, including a new social mindset that teaches people a proper set of values. Science and all the higher arts won't be popular again until people learn to value them.
Thus, asking how to make science popular I feel is the wrong question. The correct question is how to teach people it's value.
I hate printers.
In Cat's Crade, in the guise of Dr. Hoenikker "Any scientist who cannot explain his work to an eight year old is a charlatan." If you can't separate scientific process from opaque jargon, you'll never be able to engage the layman. As such, IMO, the burden falls on every one of us to try and make scientific knowledge as accessible as possible to anyone who cares to listen. Also, spending some cash on science education (maybe as much as we spend on athletics...) to get good teachers, and engaging materials and activities might help. Or maybe another Star Trek TV series. It worked for me when I was growin' up.
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.
The outcome of a science and/or engineering degree at this point is competition with millions of people making $8/hr.
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Seriously, in a self-interested, capitalist society what could POSSIBLY motivate a young person to expend limited educational resources on something that resulted in that?
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Any rational person would go for medicine, law or finance or any other field with higher pay with less chance of outsourcing.
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Whine and hand-wring all you want. We did this to ourselves when we started giving away the store to save a few bucks for next quarter. We'll never win another war because of superior technology. Any technology we *do* create will be outsourced in seconds, so why please explain to me why I would ever bother?
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Hope you're all enjoying the global marketplace.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
http://libwww.freelibrary.org/closing/
Quote:
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* Sigh *
Possibly because it's a barely significant difference. Take a look at the studies that have been performed and you see a tiny offset of the top of the bell curves. Over 95% of all people, regardless of race, fall into the same region, with slightly more of the outliers being of certain ethnicities. Given that IQ tests contain very strong cultural biases, it's difficult to draw any conclusion from the available data unless you are cherry-picking results to justify an existing bias.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is an old theme of American history, called anti-intellectualism. The American public isn't so much "anti-science" as anti-intellectual.
I think that GP has a point about the proper relationship between science and policy; all too often people use the authority of science to sneak in policy and value judgements as science (for example, intelligence testing). We need to be critical of the people who insist that science should set policy, as GP recommends.
However, to do so successfully we can't be anti-intellectual, and that's where I part with GP. The Republicans are the party that panders to anti-intellectualism; their war on science was real. G.W. Bush is an anti-intellectual poster boy, too.
Invented, just like chess.
Are you adequate?
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.
It's the fact that people consider what should be fascinating topics boring that is the problem
Thankyou for proving my point so perfectly. You did it so well that I think I may be lining myself up for a whoosh...
I hate printers.
Sorry, but you seem to state that
however; it is certainly true that
just so we could move forward, could you please give some example of a "real IQ test" which uses logic, math, and spatial recognition without any cultural biases? Most of the cases I have seen have shown problems that probably have the same solutions in different cultures, but are much easier to solve for people who have some specific experience or lack some other experience (e.g. a pattern of numbers may match some standard sequence in a culture and so the "next in the sequence" may be completely different in one culture from another. For bonus points, please tell us how to identify good "real IQ tests"; for example an association of testers you would recommend.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Spatial cognition has been shown to be culturally variable; check out the work of Stephen Levinson on language and spatial cognition. It is possible to design spatial reasoning tests that are culturally biased in that regard; e.g., the Queensland Test was designed to raise the score of Australian Aborigines relative to Australian Whites.
In fact, there's just nothing culturally neutral about getting somebody to sit down to answer an intelligence test. Read the New Yorker's article on the controversy about the Pirahã and ask yourself, in the end: how would you administer an IQ test to this tribe, and would the results be more indicative of their "intelligence" or of their cultural differences to us?
To paraphrase William Labov: if you want to figure out how intelligent somebody is, you have to enter the appropriate social relationship with that person. IQ tests simply fail this; they presuppose that everybody is a well-mannered urban European middle-class authority-fearing white-coat-deferring sit-downer, who is just delighted to sit down and perform decontextualized, pointless intellectual exercise on command.
Are you adequate?
Al Gore and James Hansen aren't just making this stuff up. They're simply relaying what 90% of scientists in related fields and what 90% of all scientists agree with. This is what folks in the world of science call a "scientific consensus". Unfortunately, because this particular scientific consensus is ideologically inconvenient for you, you want us to believe that 90% of all scientists in the world are part of a massive international conspiracy run by Al Gore.
No offense, you are exactly the problem that is being discussed here.
1. Teach critical thinking - Kids need to learn at an early age how to figure things out for themselves. This goes from how do I turn the TV on to Why is the sky blue. Self exploration of knowledge leads to a door that's hard to close. Starting at an early age, this could be enough on its own
There are a lot of folks who don't want to do that. Parents often don't want to because it can make parenting more difficult ("Why do I have to do that? That's stupid!"). Many teachers don't want to, because it undermines their "teacher is always right" authority. Many religious authorities don't want to because critical thinking will eventually lead to "How do we know what some guy wrote down 1600 years ago is true?" and before you know it the kid stops being religious. Advertisers definitely don't want kids thinking critically, because then it's harder to fool kids into wanting whatever they're selling. Basically, kids who understand critical thinking are much harder to control, and become adults that are much harder to control, and for those who make their living controlling others this is thoroughly a bad idea.
3. Say goodbye to religion - I have no problem with any specific ideology but an organization whose very approach means ignoring point number 1 and some amount of point number 2 will have no place in a scientific society. Sorry.
Actually, a lot of religions (Judaism, Buddhism, and Unitarian Universalism to name a few) encourage critical thinking, particularly around philosophical and ethical questions. There's a lot more to religion than televangelist schlock, and I don't think you're thinking critically about the place of religion in society.
I am officially gone from
As the world continues to make scientific progress (albiet more slowly than theoretically possible, but that is acceptable), it will slowly become increasingly difficult for the unintelligent and uneducated to survive.
All things and people being equal, your point might actually be true. However, with the way that western societies have been doing anything and everything to ensure the survival of the weakest, laziest, most unfit of it's citizens at the expense of the rest of the population, I doubt your premise will come true while those states continue on their march towards socialist, nanny state policies. While social welfare programs tend to give folks a big warm and fuzzy, in the long run, it squeezes any incentive for trying to get ahead in life out of all but the most motivated of individuals. While it is definitely admirable that some individuals will continue to excel regardless of the social structure they find themselves in, this policy will eventually lead to downfall of western civilization as it takes more than just a few girders to hold up an entire bridge.
For all the references to popular esteem of the sciences the 1950s and '60s, no one is asking, 'why?'
I think the answers goes to why we follow spectator sports. It also goes to why we have the current political environment.
People like Us v Them. We like having winners and losers, even if it means sometimes begin a loser.
Fox News and MSMBC have the following they do not because the common man wants to get in to the minutia of the government sausage factory. We are not a nation of policy wonks. It's Democrat v Republican; conservative v liberal.
Science was the same way after WWII. It was our scientists v their scientists. Our bomb v their bomb. Our rocket v their rocket.
The problem with science, though, is that it isn't sexy. By the time you're an elite scientist, you're old and grey whereas elite sportsmen are young and vigourous and all the things our hindbrains crave.
Not true. While a successful scientist is usually able to maintain a productive level of performance longer than an athlete, the physical sciences and mathematics are very much a young persons game.
And science is slow - you can't follow Fermilab like some do a baseball team. Let's face it: science is slow and tedious and not very exciting day-to-day.
Again I disagree. Sports are slow. Sunday on the pitch is exciting. Perhaps the highlights of training camp are exciting. But the thousands of hours in the gym, lifting the same weights or climbing the same stairs for hours are just as boring as thousands of hours of practice a musician goes through or the preparation a scientist goes through.
The difference is not the speed and the amount of drudgery to achieve excellence.
The difference is scheduling. For the sports fan, the practice is boring but come Sunday noon, there will be excitement. For the music fan, the practice is boring but come Saturday night, there will be excitement.
For the science fan, we don't know when the excitement will come. Science doesn't work on a schedule the same way.
You want people to be able to discuss science the same way they discuss politics? You want the public adoration for scientists bestowed upon athletes? Just make science the Us v Them competition it was during the height of the cold war.
The problem is this. . .
You, (the elite managerial over-seer), wants all the little people to toil in order to provide you with food, shelter, safety, power and luxury. It takes back-breaking effort to provide these things to you and there is no good reason to do it. As with most people of your sort, you live with a constant shadow on your shoulder; you harbor a morbid fear that one day the flow of wealth and abundant resources (which you don't work for) will cease. Because you have never really worked at anything, you fear work; nothing is more terrifying than the thought of being reduced to the status of a common peon. And so in fear, you cast about with great concern! How is your fear most likely to manifest? Why a popular uprising! Any moment now, you will be discovered and the slaves will take back what they have given you and which you do not deserve to have.
Thus, population management becomes a great concern to you. An obsession.
So how do you make sure that the slaves never have enough energy or awareness to see who is making their lives miserable and come together to do something about it? Why you make damned sure they are stupid and distracted and constantly fighting amongst one another!
Thus enters the Paradox! --To have the most fashionable elitist lifestyle, you need to employ the Wonders of Science! However, to employ the Wonders of Science, you need thinking men and women capable of sharp awareness and bright imagination. --And yet thinking men and women of awareness and imagination are exactly the kind of people who are most likely to realize that they are slaves and that you are their bitter enemy. They are the ones you fear most!
If only there was some way. . . --A method to mind-program people so that they retain the brain power necessary to engage in research and experimentation and other skills required by the Wonders of Science, while ALSO being remaining stupid and distracted. Is such a thing possible?
Fortunately for you, the answer is YES!
Among the maneuvers used to create the perfect army of mindless scientists and engineers are. . .
-Age segregation in schools. (Humans are pack animals; in healthy communities children of many ages play together, and the older and more experienced ones naturally take on leader/protector roles. In the school system, there are no clear leaders established through age, leading to endless, un-resolvable competition, generally resulting in the most base physical attributes becoming the dominant deciding factors. Say hello to "Jocks v.s. Geeks" --Those who are strong thinkers tend to seek love and approval from the only authority figures who appear to value such attributes, the teachers. All you have to do is program the teachers according to your system and they will make sure that the students are similarly programmed.
-Media! --Children who have survived the school system are shell-shocked by that war zone social structure. Their brains have developed strong wiring as they grew up, programed to have low self-esteem, to fear above all things, ridicule. So all you have to do is create a popular media which tells the population what is being laughed at this week, and you can rest assured that even the most progressive thinkers will shudder and cringe as their deep-programming kicks in.
-Meaningless debate! --It is important to maintain and nourish two opposing camps of thought on any number of emotionally evocative subjects. The population will self-divide and spend all their free energy fighting and arguing and hating one-another, while you rest safely up in your ivory tower and collect taxes.
-False Money and False Economic Theory. My typing muscles are getting tired, so I won't bother going into this. Any smart person, (who hasn't been laughed at recently), is capable of working out how money and debt keeps everybody in check.
-War. Again, no real need to explain this one.
There are, of course, many other techniques available, but these three are the work-h
It took long enough for me to find this response!
I'm sorry, I've been alive for twenty years shorter than the parent poster and I do not remember a time when science was ever "popular". Popularized, maybe, with the moon shots and all, but NEVER popular. If science was ever popular how would it ever lose popularity? Think about that for a moment. Science is a constantly changing beast, with something new emerging from an enormous variety of fields ... hourly! How could you ever get bored with science should it ever become popular?
I call shenanigans on the whole notion of science having been "popular" ... well, ever! Not even in Newton's time, and certainly not Galileo's when it wasn't even called science. Hell, it wasn't even called science until the last, what? 150 years of its existence. It was a branch of philosophy (natural philosophy) before that!
Science has never and probably will never be popular. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but use some scientific method and tell me when science was ever popular. I have no evidence to support the assertion and know of none to even test.
I worked in Dr. Tim Townsend's lab during grad school. He was an all-American linebacker at the University of Tennessee as an undergrad and a rising star in transgenic animal research as a PhD. We used to play pickup basketball with Dr. Robert Guyette, a famous surgeon, who was the center for the 1975 UK NCAA finals basketball team. One of my grad school classmates in our pickup group was the division II player of the year, another started for Western Michigan. So yeah, all jocks are dumb. BTW, I was the late-blooming nerd who didn't have any athletic ability but got a fellowship for my academics. That didn't stop me from competing with all of these world-class athletes - and being world class athletes didn't stop them from being world class scientists. They also happened to be terrifically nice people. The whole world isn't high school - it just seems like it while you are there.
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!
"Popularized, maybe, with the moon shots and all, but NEVER popular."
I was born in 1959, and your statement is dead-on.
Ever ready to reap the benefits of science, American culture is still bitterly backward and only changes slowly despite what popular media would have us believe. The capable few change themselves, while the mob just drone along as usual. America despises smart people, exalting the retarded (note all the programs for window-lickers) and largely abandoning their gifted superiors. The US school system was a Hellmouth long before Jon Katz wrote about it.
We need a self-aware, pro-science counterculture than can enable those who are deserving and eager, and rescue/separate them from their toxic inferiors.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."