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If I could teach the world just *one* thing
« on: 2005-04-11 11:36:56 » |
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Spiked Online asked 250 scientists this question.
If I could teach the world just *one* thing
http://www.spiked-online.com/einstein/
2005 - announced as Einstein's Year - marks the centenary of the publication of Albert Einstein's equation 'E = mc2'. To mark this occasion spiked, in collaboration with NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), has conducted a survey of over 250 renowned scientists, science communicators, and educators - including 10 Nobel laureates - asking what they would teach the world about science and why, if they could pick just one thing.
Survey responses will be published here in full at the end of April 2005, alongside an online debate, and a series of films made by science communicator Alom Shaha in which selected respondents explain and illustrate their responses. A public event will take place at London's Royal Institution on the evening of Tuesday 10 May, bringing together some of the scientists who responded.
The Guardian has leaked some of their answers, which of course are not very unexpected -- top scientist tend to be passionate with their line of work. I particularly liked the last one.
Life lessons
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1453311,00.html
Freeman Dyson:
Science is about uncertainty. We do not yet know the answers to most of the important questions — nature is smarter than we are.
Richard Dawkins:
I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs.
John Gribbin:
I cannot improve upon the comment of the American physicist Richard Feynman: "The most important information … is the atomic hypothesis … that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
Simon Baron-Cohen:
I would teach the world that scientists fall in love — with experiments. An experiment can be beautifully stunning. Experiments are not just about proof — some of them have an intrinsic elegance, that you just want to go back to and look at again and again. Take men with two X chromosomes. This puzzle of nature just called out for the experiment, conducted in 1990, to search the two X chromosomes in such individuals — to find a bit of the Y chromosome, that might have broken off and become integrated into one of the X chromosomes. It just had to be there. And sure enough, it was. What we now know to be the SRY gene — the sex-related Y gene — had got into the X chromosome. And this is the gene that turns on the process to grow testes, and become male.
Susan Blackmore:
Frighteningly, most people do not understand Darwin's great insight. What people miss is the sheer inevitability of the creative process. Once you see it —copy, vary, select; copy, vary, select —you see that design by natural selection simply has to happen. This is not like Isaac Newton's laws, or quantum physics, or any of the other great theories in science, where one can ask "why is this so?" It simply has to be the case. Then, the scary implications follow. If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe.
[rhino who never fails to take a jab at SB]: Hmm... many of the things that we understand, we tend to stop understanding on occasion...
Eric Drexler:
Physical technology evolves towards limits set by physical law, and a technology approaching the limits set by physical law must build with atomic precision. Molecular machinery provides a way to accomplish this.
Dr Robert Maynard (Senior medical officer at the UK Department of Health):
The principle of refutation put forward by the philosopher Karl Popper, in his books The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Conjectures and Refutations, is my choice. Popper argued that scientific knowledge advanced most reliably by the development and refutation of hypotheses — much more reliably than by the accretion of evidence in support of theories.
He said you cannot prove that all swans are white by counting white swans, but you can prove that not all swans are white by counting one black swan. Popper's approach is now accepted, in principle, by many scientists. And yet much research is still based upon induction — upon the collection of facts to support our ideas. Erecting hypotheses that can be falsified, and designing experiments capable of doing so, is the hallmark of the true scientist. In fact, it distinguishes the scientist from the non-scientist.
John McCarthy (inventor of the term 'artificial intelligence'):
Find the numbers, and compare them. As the physicist Lord Kelvin said in 1883, in a lecture to the Institution of Civil Engineers, "when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind".
Matt Ridley:
Science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries. Science increases the store of wonder and mystery in the world; it does not erode it. The myth that science gets rid of mysteries, started by the Romantic poets, was well nailed by Albert Einstein —whose thought experiments about relativity are far more otherworldly, elusive, thrilling, and baffling than anything dreamt up by poets.
Isaac Newton showed us the mysteries of deep space, Charles Darwin showed us the mysteries of deep time, and Francis Crick and James D Watson showed us the mysteries of deep encoding. To get rid of those insights would be to reduce the world's stock of awe.
Stuart Zola (professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences):
I would teach the world the importance of staying actively intellectually engaged throughout our lives, especially as we become elderly.
Gerardus 't Hooft (professor of theoretical physics, nobelist):
Is it really true that the world wants to hear only one thing about science? And then continue after that, with its ongoing religious, superstitious and political disputes? Maybe the world wants to hear only one thing from me. What could that be? All the important things that the world has already heard from my colleagues might be incomplete — my colleagues may have forgotten to tell the world something. What could that be? I do not know.
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