The Unscientific Age

“The Unscientific Age” is the title of chapter III in Richard Feynman’s The Meaning of It All http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_It_All.  The last half of the 20^th century went downhill under the influence of Postmodernism.  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

The Unscientific Age –

“The speed at which science has been developing for the last two hundred years has been

ever increasing, and we reach a culmination of speed now. We are in particular in the

biological sciences, on the threshold of the most remarkable discoveries. What they are

going to be I am unable to tell you. Naturally, that is the excitement of it. And the

excitement that comes from turning one stone over after another and finding underneath new discoveries has been going on now perpetually for several hundred years, and it is an ever-rising crescendo. This is, in that sense, definitely a scientific age. It has been called a heroic age, by a scientist, of course. Nobody else knows about it. Sometime when history looks back at this age they will see that it was a most dramatic and remarkable age, the transformation from not knowing much about the world to knowing a great deal more than was known before. But if you mean that this is an age of science in the sense that in art, in literature, and in people's attitudes and understandings, and so forth science plays a large part, I don't think it is a scientific age at all. You see, if you take, the heroic age of the Greeks, say, there were poems about the military heroes. In the religious period of the

Middle Ages, art was related directly to religion, and people's attitudes toward life were definitely closely knit to the religious viewpoints. It was a religious age. This is not a scientific age from that point of view.”

Required reading: page 28 from http://bondalapati.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/8773894-meaning-of-it-all-by-feynman-nobel-laureate3.pdf.

Richard Feynman gave these lectures in 1963.  It will soon be 50 years (2.5 generations) ago.

It is time to elect an honest politician, one that does not have a detailed plan with the all the answers or even a good vision of “the city on the hill.”  George H. W. Bush had “a problem” with “the vision thing.”  He didn’t know where he wanted to lead us.

Anyone with a vision of where they want to lead us is most likely a Democrat.  A good small government Republican does not have such a vision.

In the 1980s, “Build it and they will come” was a credo.  Now, “Create it and they will abuse it” seems to be more and more appropriate.  Recent studies say that the people come first.  (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110124111142.htm.)

Michigan State University. "Build it and they will come? Think again." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 24 January 2011.