scary things at CRTC

[James Knott]

Christopher Browne wrote:
> On 2009-04-08, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 11:10:16AM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
>>     
>>> To me, I see anyone who dismisses the beliefs, or lack thereof, of
>>> others with simple adjectives like "insane" as being equal foolish and
>>> close-minded.
>>>       
>> Well perhaps.
>>     
>
> Personally, I think books are a quick excuse for people too lazy to
> figure out how the world works for themselves.  Much easier to read
> and go by faith rather than to actually try to figure things out one's
> self.
>
> I also think science is being used as a means to control people who
> are willing to put their trust in faith in scientists.  I prefer
> people to think for themselves, but popular science seems to generally
> discourage that, although I am sure there are some exceptions.  I
> don't see many cases of this; people seem way more inclined to just
> trust in whatever they heard some scientist said than to do any
> verification themselves.
>
> Anyone without an irony-meter should probably ignore this...
>   
Science requires people to think & challenge and not accept things
because someone says so.  Unfortunately, many people do not make that
effort and many are ignorant of basic science.  While science grows by
building on previous work, it also grows by challenging that previous
work too.  As an example look at how astrophysics progressed from
Kepler, Newton, Einstein and others.  Kepler came up with circular
orbits, which was a big improvement over what had been claimed by the
church.  Then Newton realized orbits were elliptical and also developed
the theory of gravity.  Einstein took Newton's work and expanded it to
relativity etc.  Bottom line, look at the existing science, see where it
can be improved, where it is "good enough" and go from there.  It's a
process of constant refinement.


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists