Quote of the day - From Gryphon:
I don't often do this sort of thing - wholesale copy/paste of something someone else has posted, that is. Unless it's very, very, VERY good, and I both want to pass it on, and think the particular group of people to whom I'm posting it will both appreciate it and might not have seen it. All of which I suppose is a roundabout way of apologizing for not being able to add anything further to this in any creative way.
-Logan
--------------------
I mean... DAMN...
--------------------
I don't often do this sort of thing - wholesale copy/paste of something someone else has posted, that is. Unless it's very, very, VERY good, and I both want to pass it on, and think the particular group of people to whom I'm posting it will both appreciate it and might not have seen it. All of which I suppose is a roundabout way of apologizing for not being able to add anything further to this in any creative way.
Quote:"It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself! This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
"Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.'
"I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the pushbutton order and the human act. We have to touch people."
- the late Jacob Bronowski summarizes the ethical meaning and importance of the scientific principle of uncertainty, in 1973's The Ascent of Man
Quote:[table][/table] From: biomekanic
Date: December 20th, 2010 02:27 pm (local)
I saw the BBC production of this, and I will never forget him putting his hand into the pond at Auschwitz and pulling of a handful of ashey mud, that most likely contained members of his family.
Quote:[table][/table] From: Date: December 20th, 2010 02:34 pm (local)
It's an incredibly powerful piece of television. Bronowski spends the whole first 11 episodes of the series as this kindly, avuncular Polish math professor type, hesitating, scratching his forehead, cleaning his glasses, while he muses insightfully and informatively about the development of human civilization... and then,without changing his mannerisms at all, he suddenly busts loose with this searing indictment of Nazi pseudoscience and human complacency. "It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance."
And then the plea for the value of real, uncertain science, and the handful of ashes from the pond, just as he says, "We have to touch people." I had been enjoying The Ascent of Man up to that point, but that sequence just blew me right the hell away. Even just the text of it is moving; with the imagery that goes along with it, it's that rare example of something that really could only have had its full impact as television.
-Logan
--------------------
I mean... DAMN...
--------------------
