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The Subversive Nature of Scientific Inquiry By: Mark Morgan on 10/21/2001; 6:14 PM Go ahead, you postmodernist swine. Write your incomprehensible papers about the new paradigms. Think that you're the young turks, the overthrowers of authority, smashers of oppression, saviors of the proletariat. You just keep deluding your sorry selves. You write about the nature of science. You claim it is a new religion, a new oppression, a new tool of the authority. You sneer at it, claim it is cold and heartless and mechanical. The servant of corporations and governments. A bludgeon upside the head of the little guy. Another way for "them" to screw you over. Meanwhile, the real rebellion will pass you by. Because science is the tool of the rebel. Whatever your little thing is, whatever it is that you use to make you feel better than another, science is here to shatter it. Little pieces of self-importance all over the lab floor. One race is better than another? Science is here to tell you that's crap. The rich deserve to get richer? Science is here to tell you that ain't always so. You're the center of the universe? Nope. Missed that one, didn't you. Whaler pedagogues and demagogues slide smooth stories into your ear about destroying society, science is one step ahead of you. Because science doesn't give a damn what you think. Science looks at the universe, and the universe stares right back at it. Reality is a cold, uncaring place. Humans aren't anything more than a speck. Your little groups and your little conference papers and your little feelings of being oh so high and mighty because you've abandoned your "preconceptions" pale. Science is the ultimate abandonment of preconceptions. What you thought you knew today, science will rip out of your hands tomorrow. Think you're standing on some solid ground, science will reduce it to a chaotic mass of exotic particles and unreal creations. So what are you waiting for? The change is today, if you want it. Go learn some damn science. Keep an eye on what those kooks in the white lab coats are saying, and shout it to the four winds. Nothing upsets authority like change. They hate it. So change things on them. Every time they get comfortable shove some research in their face and show them an uncomfortable truth. Keep them moving. Keep them guessing what is going to come next. It won't be easy at first. You're going to have to get rid of millions of years of evolution in thought and a whole lifetime of developing biases and unreason. But you can do it. Read some Sagan. Read some Ferman. Read some Asimov. Grab some of that James Randi juju. Pick up a Skeptical Inquirer. When your mind is free, when you really understand it, you will see how to make science your companion. Your friend. And your tool. It is the ultimate tool of the radical. You'll thank me for it.
RE: The Subversive Nature of Scientific Inquiry By: ScottN on 4/25/2000; 6:22 PM You're the center of the universe? Nope.
Actually, yes, you are. Just ask my good buddy Mr. Albert Einstein. You just aren't the center of the universe the way that you think you are.
RE: The Subversive Nature of Scientific Inquiry By: Evan on 4/9/2001; 6:33 PM Well in reality we are not the center of the universe in of itself. We are however the center of our own personal universe which consists of sensory input and perception. Outside of one's own existence nothing else can truly ever be proven without assuming that things outside your mind exist. Even sensory input can be false (hallucinations) therefore only thought exists. Its a bit wacko but that's the reality of it.
RE: The Subversive Nature of Scientific Inquiry By: Mark Morgan on 4/9/2001; 8:48 PM I'm with Scott on this one: we're at the center of the universe, relatively speaking, because there are no absolute reference points. There are just reference points we agree on. I do believe that we are limited to our perceptions, augmented by the tools we design, and by our reason. That's why I believe all knowledge is provisional, and why I'm an atheist. (Among other reasons.)
RE: The Subversive Nature of Scientific Inquiry By: Evan on 4/9/2001; 9:51 PM Well now that I think about it, if the universe is infinite, then there every single point can be construed to be the center as it is equidistant from boundaries of the universe which are infinitely far away.
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