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Science Luminary Martin Gardner Dead at 95
From James Randi's blog comes word that science writer Martin Gardner has died at the age of 95. I never met Gardner, but one of his books (Entertaining Science Experiments With Everyday Objects) has been a favorite of mine since I was 6 or 7 years old; I didn't realize until just now quite how many books he authored.
His pages in Scientific American were something I always looked forward to, and from which I always learned something. Glad he was among us.
I want to speak for the entire geek community, so I'm posting A.C.
Martin, you will be dearly missed. You've probably changed more lives than you could ever realize, and this planet was a better place because you existed.
Requiescat in pace.
It's guys like Martin that provided some balance against mindless idiots like those on the Texas education boards.
Let's hope there's a thousand more Martins out there. Surely he would hope the same.
RIP.
In the 1970s and early 80s, before the internet, before personal computers, nothing linked geeks together more than Martin Gardner's monthly column in Scientific American. I amazed myself with his binary card deck, and collected matchboxes to make a tic-tac-toe learning computer.
His work will live on. I'm sitting next to a shelf full of his books as I type this.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
>He was of the idea that there is no way to prove the non-existence of god
This is, in fact, correct. In natural sciences it is only possible to show that something does exist. It is not possible to prove non-existatnce. (It is not the case in mathematics, but mathematics is not a natural science).
The easiest way to understand it is to realize that the body observations available to science was taken in a limited period of time and area of space. Thus the our current scientific view of the world is only formally valid in this limited domain. What exist outside of it is only our educated guess.
To be perfectly honest, atheism is hurt more by the attitude that leads you to take a dump on a guy who taught so many people about science and mathematics. So he was a theist? Who cares? I had no idea about his views either way reading his books, and it doesn't matter to me. Sounds like you have some single-issue myopia.
And if we all switched to organic, large portions of the human population would starve, as we couldn't possibly produce as much food as cheaply to feed everyone.
Wait a minute, people would starve because we can't feed them cheaply? This is bullshit. Organic wouldn't be the reason people would starve, corporate greed would be. Further, all we have to do to have enough fertilizer for organic food production for all citizens would be to stop piping our shit off to sewage "treatment plants" and shit in a composting toilet instead. Sewage sludge is not a safe fertilizer; composted shit is. The Green Revolution fed nobody who would have otherwise starved, and there are numerous methods of organic farming which produce more food per acre than so-called Green Revolution methods. Today, most farming doesn't even utilize crop rotation; we're not using even the most basic technologies of farming.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"