Simple Country Physicist

The incoming email queue this morning included a note from the Encyclopedia Britannica folks [1] reminding me that today is the anniversary of the initiation of the Scopes trial. [Link] This was the classic litigation where the state of Tennessee was demonstrated to an uninterested world to be mystical and medieval. This was no great shakes. Most of the old Confederacy was and is that way. Everyone likes the ‘comfort food’ of the mind and religious mysticism is often cotton candy and heart attack rolled into one.

Anyway I note this because I also got an article from the Scientific American folks [Link] mumbling about a recent PEW poll that science is moribund in Amerika. Realizing that the SA folks were self-serving in this matter, pushing a podcast, and recognizing how rotten and decrepit they are these days, I was not too upset. Besides, I already had the poll results in hand.[2] [Link] The results are a mixed bag. First, some overall ratings

The 0.84 of the sample population thinking science is good is refreshing, but it still seems to be mental comfort food. The rankings of good to society is a bit meatier even though it is again irrationality and mystical. I find that soldiers coming in first is a clarion for the volunteer army but I am a bit disappointed about teachers coming in number two. I guess baby sitting is a higher calling than I thought. I also have to assume ‘doctors’ means physicians since most scientists are doctors, after all. But the most telling piece was that while Amerikan scientists think they are hot stuff, probably the academics, the general population just thinks they are above average, which is more than I suspect they deserve.

The other part of the report is much more damning,

In the last ten years science has dropped by > 0.4 while civil rights have tripled. Not an unworthy endeavor and I would not want to take it back, but it tells us a lot about that mental comfort food.

It is not clear if these samples mean much of anything except the nature of the population itself. I noted last week an article [Link] that falls into the genre of “The End of Science”. The tenor of the article was one of the interviewees declaiming that scientific understanding of reality is complete in terms of framework if not all the details. Two thoughts appertained. The first was the claims at this point in the last century that all that needed be done in physics was measured the fundamental constants of the universe more accurately. The other was that Sir Arthur C. Clarke article about the computer eliterating the ten thousand names of the deity and the universe quietly ceasing to exist because humanity had served their purpose.

I should perhaps comment that some of those constants are no longer considered to be constants. I would not belittle the work of others, even if they are hot house academics, but anyone who tells me something is complete about our understanding of reality reminds me of the old adage “trust but verify”. So until the whole thing has been verified, I await developments.

I have also commented earlier about the sorry state an organization gets into once it has so many rules that any activity is forbidden and punishable. Part of our difficulty is that this has become somewhat the situation with science. The body of knowledge has become so vast and complicated that more and more people are needed to work on smaller and smaller pieces of it with less and less result, and more and more of that result is redundant.[3] This is reflected in the attitudes of the consumerate. The activity of science has always been viewed by the general run of humanity as unproductive and irrelevant to the basic, lower level Maslovian demands. In absence of any striking perception it seems unsurprising that the same fraction of students study science as theology. But more critically, science is itself actually drowning in a plethora of minutiae.

[1]  Part of their advertising. They keep sending me emails offering to sell me all sorts of stuff ranging from the ant coprolites to elephant chittlins. They seem quite oblivious to the idea that anyone would use any OS other that Windows. I like their encyclopedia on a DVD, after all, even old retired flatulent nerds need to look things up some times, and it saves me having to stumble about my study or go visit the Greater Metropolitan Arab library, which is always closed when I need it. This eEncyclopedia is indeed one of the primary reasons I keep a Windows machine around, besides FD SCP and her sewing software.
[2]  One of the things that never ceases to amaze and amuse about journalists is how slime moldish they take their readership to be. Evidently in addition to being unable to write articles and understand science simultaneously, and opting almost universally for the former over the latter, they are also unable to comprehend technology. This latter descends to the most basic of levels. The SA folks have subscription email announcements and they have an RSS feed. Other people including the PEW folks have one or both of these. So how is it that SA readers, based on the behavior of their journalists, have the have the interactive neuronage to subscribe to one or both of the SA services but none of the others? The World Wonders.
[3]  The poll folks hate it when you ask how many redundant samples they had in a poll. This is a natural consequence of any stochastic sampling but one hidden from view by the pollsters, for quite obvious reasons. The same increasingly also applies to science.

science, poll, management, humans, journalism