It’s easy to dismiss elites these days, particularly the political and financial variety. But scientists deserve our respect for the rigor of their endeavor. Respect is not worship, though. Investigate.
Once upon a time, we burned inconvenient, myth-shattering scientists at the stake.
Copernicus, the founder of modern astronomy who posited a heliocentric solar system rather than an Earth-centric universe, was merely marginalized by the Catholic Church and Martin Luther. He subsequently abandoned his ideas and didn’t publish his theory until he lay on his deathbed.
Kepler endorsed and defended Copernicus’ sun-centered theory and also discovered that planets move in ellipses. His reputation is mixed — there is a NASA project to search for habitable planets named for him but also modern journalists are accusing him of murder. He wasn’t burned at the stake. But his mother was imprisoned for witchcraft, released only after he defended her knowledge of medicine and deployed some common sense.
Galileo’s observations using the recently invented telescope confirmed Copernicus’ theory. In 1616, however, religious leaders condemned the telescope and declared “heretical” the notion that Earth rotated about the sun. And in 1624, Galileo was banished to his estate for the remainder of his life.
Free Reports:
Get Our Free Metatrader 4 Indicators - Put Our Free MetaTrader 4 Custom Indicators on your charts when you join our Weekly Newsletter
Get our Weekly Commitment of Traders Reports - See where the biggest traders (Hedge Funds and Commercial Hedgers) are positioned in the futures markets on a weekly basis.
But it was Giordano Bruno who suffered the hottest fate.
The 16th-century Italian scientist expressed his belief in an infinite universe and in the existence of other solar systems. A product of the Reformation, Bruno was declared “an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic.” He replied: “You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.”
He burned in 1600, but it wasn’t necessarily for his scientific work. He also denied the divinity of Christ, for example, and challenged various other core Catholic doctrines.
Bruno certainly was, if not a “martyr for science,” a martyr for free thought.
We have come a long, long way over the past four or so millennia, whether Bruno died for empiricism or not.
Indeed, we even have an annual awards ceremony for science designed to evoke that pinnacle of celebrity culture that is the Oscars.
As Lisa Grossman writes for New Scientist: “At the fifth annual Breakthrough Prize ceremony last night, 14 scientists received a total of $25 million in science prizes for fundamental contributions to human knowledge.
“The ceremony, held at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, featured all the glitz and glam of the Oscars: a red carpet, musical guests such as Alicia Keys and will.i.am, and Morgan Freeman as host.”
We even elevate to celebrity status the occasional superstar astrophysicist.
Carl Sagan, for example, earned tons of mainstream notice during the 1980s for his 13-part PBS documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
His work is still influencing researchers, and he’s the inspiration for work that’s led to an exponential increase in the estimate of potential Earth-like planets over the past couple decades.
The Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, established in May 2015, “explores factors that determine if a planet or moon can host life and how we could find it by bringing together experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines.”
Bill Borucki, the lead investigator for NASA’s Kepler project, recently summarized his team’s findings:
We have learned most stars have planets, that Earth-sized planets are common, and a good fraction are in the habitable zone of their star. And when you put the numbers together: 100 billion stars, 10% with Earth-sized planets, 10% stars like the sun, that’s a billion Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of stars like the sun.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has also earned some notoriety in recent years, igniting the ire of religious conservatives and climate change deniers as well as cultural critics not amused by his commodification of the universe and its mysteries.
And then there’s Stephen Hawking, author of the 1988 record-breaking best-seller A Brief History of Time and subject of the 2014 Oscar-winning biopic The Theory of Everything. We’ve written recently of the famous physicist’s famous pessimism.
Indeed, only last Thursday, writing from the platform of The Guardian, did he write that, “We are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity,” a result of “climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans.”
And there’s the fact that “We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it.”
Thus, “now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together.”
Hawking’s admonition begs the question, are we capable of working together?
He acknowledges his place among the “rarefied” elite. “In addition to this,” he writes, “with the celebrity that has come with my books, and the isolation imposed by my illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting taller.”
From there, he observes the evolving political landscape in the United States and United Kingdom:
So the recent apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been abandoned by their leaders.
It was, everyone seems to agree, the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere.
I appreciate Hawking’s humility. On behalf of his fortunate class, he concedes their mistakes and cautions against dismissing recent electoral results on both sides of the Atlantic as “outpourings of crude populism that fail to take account of the facts.”
I’m also reminded of George Carlin, whose “vuja dé” routine is “a battle cry of sorts for innovators who aspire to make big change by identifying opportunities that others don’t see,” according to the Harvard Business Review.
It’s another Carlin quote I have in mind, however, as I consider our cultural priorities, including football, the Kardashians, and pizza crusts stuffed with hot dogs: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that.”
That’s us. Maybe not you, of course, and certainly not me. You’re reading this, and I wrote it. So we’re obviously in Carlin’s top half.
There’s a corollary to that riff: “Then there are some people – they’re not stupid – they’re full of sh*t.”
These are our politicians, the leaders who endorse, encourage, and abet our skepticism of empiricism.
Sports, celebrity, pizza, and politics are easy. Everybody is entitled to an opinion or a hot take: There’s no fundamental requirement of expertise.
In other words, everybody gets a trophy. It’s just my opinion, and I’m entitled to it, whether or not I did the work required to base it on a solid foundation.
Yeah, sure, it’s easy to bash elites on the coasts.
The brilliant HBO series Silicon Valley does it to great effect with satire and its mock “making the world a better place” mantra.
Of course, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (GS) Lloyd Blankfein had no such self-awareness when he declared himself just a banker “doing God’s work.”
The Great Dismissal these days – the marginalization of science despite the ostensible veneration we pay Sagan, Tyson, Hawking, and the Breakthrough Prize winners – is that global warming is “just a theory.”
Well, a scientific theory is actually a hypothesis that’s supported by rigorous observation and testing. It is a valid explanation arrived at by scientists using the scientific method.
We should respect – though certainly not worship – scientists. Aristotle advised long ago to investigate, at all times, everything, and everywhere.
But as for those who practice the scientific method, they’re smart. They have passion. They work hard. They accomplish things that will actually benefit the human race.
Will an awards show with million-dollar prizes make celebrities of Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss, Joseph Polchinski, Andrew Strominger, Cumrun Vafa, Jean Bourgain, Stephen Elledge, Harry Noller, Roeland Nusse, Yoshinori Ohsumi, or Huda Yahya Zoghbi?
Who knows?
But the potential for a major monetary payoff and some minor fame may inspire a few kids to pursue hard science.
And we’ll rely upon them to forge our future.
Indeed, without those who are researching the cosmos and finding our next planetary home, we literally have no future at all.
This Week In…
Prudence, in the “practical wisdom” sense of the virtue, courtesy of Quartz, where Erik Olsen profiles “molecular artist” David Goodsell and his fascinating work:
“A Scientist’s Paintings Reveal the Incredible Beauty of the Living Cell“
Smart Investing,
David Dittman
Editorial Director, Wall Street Daily
The post Are We Too Stupid for True Freedom? appeared first on Wall Street Daily.
