Here's the first one at:
http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gil ... index.html
And here's another Salon article at:
Wednesday, Nov 3, 2010 11:30 ET
Science takes a hit on Election Day
Technology leaders constantly complain about lousy
education; time for them to step up to the need for
real science
By Dan Gillmor
YouTube screen shot
Eric Schmidt and James Cameron
The Democrats weren't the only big loser in yesterday's election. Science got clobbered, too.
Fueled by disdain for government interference with business and tanker loads of cash from the energy industry and its allies, the Republican party has been moving steadily into the denial camp on global climate change, or at least deep skepticism. And it's practically an article of faith among the tea-party activist crowd. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press showed a yawning gap between Democrats and Republicans over the issue, with just 38 percent of Republicans believing that the earth is getting warmer -- a belief that drops to 23 percent among tea party Republicans.
By every account, the Republican takeover of the House is likely to derail any possibility of serious action on climate change during at least the next two years, longer if President Obama is defeated for reelection in 2012. And Republicans in the House have vowed to go to war against the Obama administration's environmental policies, including its (too tepid) approach to climate change. Republicans have proclaimed their intention to use their new investigatory powers -- the majority party controls congressional investigations -- to go after climate scientists.
The Republican attack on science is nothing new. The Bush administration made an art form of it, not just on climate but by supporting such anti-science initiatives as creationism; at one point during his presidency George W. Bush said he thought intelligent design should be taught in class as the other side of the issue, implying two roughly equal sides to an issue where essentially all the scientific evidence supports evolution and virtually none supports creationism.
The war on science has extended into the classrooms of America. Biologists are constantly warding off creationists' efforts to put "intelligent design" (the standard code word for creationism) into the curriculum. Climate science will likely face even more hostility, especially given the moneyed interests fighting to curb the truth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent so freely to elect the Republican House, has ginned up a "teaching guide" in collaboration with a textbook publisher that should know better to persuade kids that we can't afford to save the planet.
There's at least one major industry in this country that absolutely relies on workers who don't deny reality, and who need to have learned well in math and science. It's the technology industry, the leaders of which are constantly wailing about the lousy quality of American schools. Most of the tech leaders were silent on creationism, shamefully so. At least a few, including Google's Eric Schmidt, have offered their opinions that global climate change is a serious issue that we have to deal with sooner than later. Schmidt made that point rather forcefully last week during a Churchill Club conversation with film director and environmental activist James Cameron.
The tech industry as a whole has been loath to take on causes that don't have a direct impact on its own immediate bottom line. But what better cause could there be than to defend science, the bedrock of everything that makes this industry work.
No group of leaders, speaking out loudly in defense of science and against propaganda, could have a greater impact on this critically important issue. Time is running out for them, and for all of us.
http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the ... index.html
Ah yes! And it gets even better!!!
Thursday, Nov 11, 2010 18:12 ET
Defending Einstein from the new barbarians
By Andrew Leonard
Albert Einstein
Paul Fishbane, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Virginia, is making a bit of a stretch when he compares a nascent right-wing attack on Einstein's theory of general relativity to the condemnation of so-called "Jewish Physics" organized by the Nazis. But that doesn't make "Time Warp," his essay on Einstein, relativity, science and politics any less fascinating. (Thanks to Steve Silberman for the tip.) The practice of science is in sore need of eloquent and profound defenders these days. Fishbane delivers.
Fishbane's evidence for a modern day conservative assault on Einstein's theories of space and time mostly boils down to an entry in Conservapedia, the right-wing alternative to Wikipedia. In my universe, it is just not possible to take seriously a source which cites Jesus Christ's act of turning water into wine as a counterexample to general relativity. I like my cult superstitions and my science kept separated, thank you very much.
But Fishbane's retelling of the Nazi response to Einstein's work is compelling, and his explanation of how general relativity works -- and doesn't work -- is lucid. And the underlying narrative push against "the now unpleasantly familiar idea of a brutish political mechanism rejecting uncomfortable if well-founded science" is all too relevant in the here and now. It's amazing that the fundamental integrity of science needs explaining in the 21st century, but I'm thankful people like Fishbane around to have at it.
What makes a theory in physical science? For a set of ideas to be "scientific," they must have testable consequences. The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus was likely the first, roughly 2,500 years ago, to lay out the idea that all observed events have discoverable causes. It's an idea that -- because it wrests authority from man and hands it to nature -- has not always been politically acceptable. But Western civilization has used it for some 500 years to bring humanity a very long way in a short space of time. When a set of physical ideas sets up a framework that has quantitatively testable consequences for a range of phenomena -- and those tests bear up --then this framework in science is called a theory.
The word has little to do with the detective who when he finds a dead man in a closed room announces a theory for how the crime was committed. "Only a theory," is a dismissive phrase, one often heard in ignorant refutations of evolution, geology, modern medicine, and global warming. But the word is high praise in physical science, where it indicates depth of meaning and breadth of application.
Hear, hear!
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-polit ... time-warp/
Science has always come under attack from religious fanatics and political extremists on both the far right and the far left.A NEW READ ON JEWISH LIFE
Time Warp
Recent right-wing rejections of Einsteinâ??s theory of relativity echo Nazi dismissals of
what they called â??Jewish Physicsâ??
By Paul Fishbane | Nov 11, 2010 7:00 AM
Clifford K. Berryman cartoon of Albert Einstein and a man
working on his income tax, 1929.
Library of Congress
In a slow mid-summer news cycle this year, Albert Einstein found himself unwittingly in the pantheon of the rightâ??s culture-war targets, which already included Darwin, atheists, and paleontology. In August, the liberal-leaning site TPMMuckraker discovered that a conservative website called Conservapedia had labeled Einsteinâ??s theory of relativity a liberal conspiracy. Conservapedia, meanwhile, had been founded in 2006 by Andrew Schlafly, the son of conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly, with the announced purpose to counter the â??liberal biasâ? of the user-written and -edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia while mimicking its aesthetic. Conservapedia looks to change the record on, among other topics, Richard Dawkins, the causes of homosexuality, â??Hollywood values,â? global warming, Barack Obama, and Judaism. (â??The Talmud is another ancient Jewish writing considered by some Jews to contain traditions dating back to Moses himself,â? it says.) Einstein joins this list under articles on the â??Theory of relativityâ? and â??Counterexamples to Relativity.â? The latter describes relativity as â??heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.â?
This is not the first time Einstein has met political resistance. In 1905, then working at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Einstein proposed that time and space formed a four-dimensional continuum with an absolute value for the speed of light, and he worked out the essential consequences of this very simple picture: special relativity. Ten years later, working in Zurich but also in Berlin, he incorporated the effects of masses and developed the theory of general relativity. The reaction in the scientific community was both a burst of experimental activity testing these theoriesâ?? predictions and a backlash of skepticism and confusion. Special relativity describes how observers moving steadily with respect to one another see measurements of space and time in the otherâ??s frame. General relativity extended special relativity to include the possibilities of accelerating observers and predicted what happens around nearby masses. Together, the theories thoroughly upended accepted notions of space and time, and they remained controversial enough that when Einstein was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1921, it was for his work on the photoelectric effect, not relativity.
Some objections to relativityâ??the special and general theories are joined with this one wordâ??were honest ones, part of the cooperative enterprise of science. The worldview that had become habitual was that the natural world was propagated on an ether, a kind of invisible loom on which the universeâ??s tapestry could be wovenâ??Godâ??s very â??firmamentâ? of Genesis 1:6-8, according to Conservapedia. Special relativity eliminated the ether. General relativity was first of all technically hard to understand, and secondly the changes it made to the predictions of the prevailing theory of gravitationâ??credited to Isaac Newton and dating to 1666â??were only very fine ones, and small predicted effects are hard to test for. Moreover, general relativity was philosophically a radical departure from Newtonâ??s description of gravity; Einsteinâ??s general relativity shows that space-time is curved in the presence of masses. It was no wonder that even many physicists were honestly discomfited by relativity.
But other objections to Einsteinâ??s ideas were not honest. Some German scientists, still harboring nationalist resentments from World War I and its aftermath (such as over English becoming the leading scientific language), found Einsteinâ??s Jewish background, as well as his outspoken opposition to war, to be more offensive than his science. Einstein was called a â??plagiaristâ?; his theory was called a â??hoax.â? And as Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography of Einstein, in 1921, a Munich party functionary named Adolf Hitler echoed a prevailing sentiment when he wrote disparagingly in a newspaper, â??Science, once our greatest pride, is today being taught by Hebrews.â?
When the Nazis came to power in Germany, opportunistic anti-Semitic physicists, including Nobel Prize winners such as Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, assailed Einstein. Lenard and Stark were not pure ideologues, at least in the earlier parts of their careers. Both made substantial Nobel-worthy discoveries in classical physics. But whether out of spite, bigotry, professional jealousy, or ignorance, Lenard publicly attacked Einstein, perhaps most famously during a 1920 meeting of the Deutscher Naturforscher-Gesellschaft, a typical scientific congress, when he said Einstein lacked common sense. (Einstein is said to have replied, â??May I point out to my colleague Lenard that common sense is something very relative,â? a wise-ass remark that wouldnâ??t have endeared him to anyone.) Privately, Lenard scribbled furious, hateful, and uncomprehending margin notes on Einsteinâ??s 1905 article in the academic journal Z. fur Physik that established special relativity and among other things declared the now-famous equivalence of energy and mass. But this was hardly just a personal disagreement.
Under National Socialism, Lenard and Starkâ??s very visible attempts to discredit Einsteinâ??s ideas on relativity were concurrent with the development of an ideologically driven Aryan version of science known as Deutsche-Physik, which adhered more closely to the classical model. Hitler himself was the symbolic leader, and said to be the premier scientist, of his nationâ??s physics, which was aligning with other areas of intellectual life in the prewar period in its opposition to all things non-Aryan. Deutsche-Physik represented the now unpleasantly familiar idea of a brutish political mechanism rejecting uncomfortable if well-founded science.
That new science came to be known in Nazi Germany as â??Jewish Physics,â? in opposition to Deutsche-Physik. â??Badâ? Einsteinian ideas, and those having to do with the thoroughly revolutionary science of quantum physics, comprised a threat to the absolutism of an established order. Special relativity did away with the ether, and thereby long careers dedicated to its study. General relativity, for its part, was non-intuitive: There was no way to directly visualize through human experience the curvature of space-time. As with many paradigm shifts, scientists of the old guard turned on other scientists rather than refuting the new science, lacking the tools to do so. Relativity was deemed too â??theoretical,â? too mathematical, too abstract. And though relativity had nothing to do with moral relativism, it still seemed to hint at a rejection of absolute certainty, and therefore order.
Einstein, already a controversial and convulsive figure by virtue of his outspoken pacifism and the revolutionary nature of his ideas, became the figurehead of â??Jewish Physics.â? Jewish physicists, who for a very long time had had to fight the anti-Semitic policies of some German universities, along with many of the German physicists who defended Einsteinâ??s work, suffered slander, lost their academic posts, or went into exile. These included the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was neither Jewish nor politically active. In 1937, Stark publicly called Heisenberg a â??White Jewâ?: In Nazi Germany this would have had serious negative consequences had Heisenberg not also had a remote personal connection to Heinrich Himmler.
***
At least part of the current hostility to relativity seems to stem from abuse of Einsteinâ??s ideas outside of physics. The most noteworthy of theseâ??directly cited in Conservapediaâ??is an article written by Laurence H. Tribe, the influential Harvard constitutional lawyer who argued for the losing side in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and later served as judicial adviser to the presidential campaign of his former student Barack Obama. Tribeâ??s 1989 essay, titled â??The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers can Learn from Modern Physics,â? makes vague analogies based on a misunderstanding of Einsteinâ??s ideas and those of quantum physics to discuss constitutional law. Tribe sees, for example, an equivalent to Heisenbergâ??s uncertainty principle in the way â??the very act of judging alters the context and relationships being judged.â? It may have been the fashion in academia in the late 1980s to find social and cultural relevance in scientific thoughtâ??and judging may indeed have an effect on societyâ??but courtroom law has nothing to do with ideas about the physical world. (It was in 1992, in fact, that Noam Chomsky called the postmodern idea of science as a cultural constructâ??â??the entire idea of â??white male scienceâ?? â?â??reminiscent of â??Jewish Physics.â?)
That Tribeâ??s description of what the American right now calls an â??activist judgeâ? was so egregious a misappropriation of an essential aspect of quantum physics was not what troubled those who now question relativity. Tribeâ??s conflation of Einsteinâ??s relativity with moral relativism was for them, instead, evidence of something deeper. Tribe had published his essay in the Harvard Law Review and had acknowledged, among others, then-27-year-old Barack Obama for his â??analytic and research assistance.â? A few months later, Obama would become the first African-American president of the Review, and Tribe and Obama would continue to be closely linked. Last February, Tribe was appointed by Obama to his unusual positionâ??one created just for himâ??at the Department of Justice. As Conservapedia puts it in its entry for â??Theory of relativity,â? under the subheading â??Political aspects of relativityâ?:
Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of â??curvature of spaceâ? to promote a broad legal right to abortion.
As the Conservapedia version goes, Einstein is at the root of a Great Liberal Conspiracy. His work is not science but a foundation for radicalism; relativity is not a scientific theory but the advance guard for an all-out assault on the edifice of fundamental conservatism and, by extension, on absolute authority.
There is no overt or direct anti-Semitism in Conservapediaâ??s articles on relativity. There are instead a list of 30 â??counterexamples to relativityâ? that purport to discredit Einsteinâ??s theories. The list comprises outright falsehoods, miscalculations, deep misunderstandings of relativity and of the nature of science, and irrelevancies, such as biblical events. For example, Jesus violated special relativityâ??s proscription against speeds faster than light when he turned water into wine in Galilee (John 4:46).
***
What makes a theory in physical science? For a set of ideas to be â??scientific,â? they must have testable consequences. The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus was likely the first, roughly 2,500 years ago, to lay out the idea that all observed events have discoverable causes. Itâ??s an idea thatâ??because it wrests authority from man and hands it to natureâ??has not always been politically acceptable. But Western civilization has used it for some 500 years to bring humanity a very long way in a short space of time. When a set of physical ideas sets up a framework that has quantitatively testable consequences for a range of phenomenaâ??and those tests bear upâ??then this framework in science is called a theory.
The word has little to do with the detective who when he finds a dead man in a closed room announces a theory for how the crime was committed. â??Only a theory,â? is a dismissive phrase, one often heard in ignorant refutations of evolution, geology, modern medicine, and global warming. But the word is high praise in physical science, where it indicates depth of meaning and breadth of application.
In science, a theory is not a closed system, perfectly insular and complete. The degree and care with which a theory has been tested (and shown to hold up) bolsters its credibility, but does not shelter it from further testing. In science, there is no such thing as â??completed testingâ? of a theory. Isaac Newtonâ??s theory of gravitation makes testable predictions that are nearly perfect. Einsteinâ??s general relativity makes all the predictions of Newtonian gravitation with tinyâ??and not so tiny in certain astronomical domainsâ??corrections. Do the corrections required by general relativity show up in the data gathered from tests of those predictions? Every time. For example, Newtonian gravity predicts that the orbit of a planet around a perfectly spherical uniform sun is closedâ??it precisely comes back around to its original position. The presence of other planets, or a slightly non-spherical sun, Newtonian gravity holds, can cause the orbit not to close. General relativity introduces on top of all the Newtonian predictions a further calculable, tiny, but testable adjustment to the orbit.
General relativity, like all scientific theories before and after it, is subject to further testing, which may make it fail. This is precisely what happened to Newtonâ??s theory. Despite the power and accuracy of the predictions general relativity makes about gravitation in the observable world, it has for a long time been known to be incomplete. When physicists try to incorporate quantum mechanics into general relativity, serious technical difficulties arise. There have been some ideas proposed that get around these difficultiesâ??like â??string theoryâ?â??but these ideas have yet to produce unique testable predictions that are within our current technological reach. As our understanding of the universe grows, general relativity will eventually be replaced by another, more complete, theory.
Yet contrary to the view of Conservapedians, relativity qualifies as extremely successful. Nuclear power plants, PET scanners in hospitals, and radioactive tracers, for example, all have critical aspects provided by relativity. The GPS in your phone, car, or airplane works by seeing how the signals from precise atomic clocks ticking away in satellite orbit (moving at nearly 9,000 mph) are received at the position of the detecting device. When there are several orbiting clocks emitting such signals, then a detector at different distances from them will receive the signals delayed, and triangulation off the two clocks provides a position. But for triangulation to work with enough accuracy to be useful, you have to know very precisely the rate at which the clocks tick. Both special and general relativity describe calculable adjustments to the clocksâ?? ticking ratesâ??since the theories predict how clocks run at different speeds when moving relative to the observer or under the influence of large masses like the Earth. Without relativity to accurately predict these effects, a GPS system might tell us that we are 10 miles off the Jersey shore even if we are standing in Times Square. For its part, Conservapedia cites a 1997 web posting to erroneously note that â??GPS satellites are synchronized to Coordinated Universal Time by radio signals from the ground; therefore, they cannot currently be used to test general relativity.â? Strangely, that same source reads: â??GPS provides a rich source of examples for the applications of the concepts of relativity.â?
Thereâ??s another real-world device that can be used to test relativity, of course. The device was developed by exiled European scientists working off the theoretical concepts of what the Nazis called â??Jewish Physics.â? Like Einsteinâ??s relativity, the device overturned a habitual worldview by providing a radical new vision of the world. And the device did more than re-prove Einsteinâ??s powerful theory: It ended World War II, and it tragically proved that â??Jewish Physicsâ? in fact provided a useful and accurate description of the physical world.
Paul Fishbane is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Virginia.
Throughout history, religion has always been the prime reason for science being suppressed and intellectuals being persecuted. Isn't that right, Galileo!
Darwin's Theory of Evolution has been blamed for causing crime, the so-called "Social Darwinism" and the phrase "survival of the fittest" but that fact is, Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest" but rather, natural selection is the ability of a species to adapt to environmental changes. The more diversity within a species, the better the chances for a species to survive in a changing environment. So, the practice of Eugenics actually lessens diversity.
If Charles Darwin were alive today, he would be appalled by how his theory is being misused to implement social policies. There is no such thing as Darwinism anymore than there is any such thing as Newtonism, or Einsteinism.
Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest" and I have read somewhere that in all the novels about Sherlock Holmes, he never said in any of the novels "Elementary my dear Watson!" which is another misconception.
And now, Einstein's theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity has been accused of creating a social climate of "moral relativism" when relativity theory has nothing to do with social and political settings.
It's only about time and space, motion and speed, and the physical properties of the universe and nothing to do with politics.
When I was only in the 5th grade, I knew that someday, there would be a social and political and religious climate that would become more and more hostile toward science.
I saw if coming, after my 5th grade teacher who was super Gung Ho about PE and sports would not allow me to check out an Astronomy book from the school library, and we got into an argument over it, then he dragged me out into the hallway, and bashed my head against the corner of the concrete block wall.
After the sharp blow to my head, a bright flash of light, a ringing noise in my head, and dizziness, I got a revelation that someday, the political climate in the USA would become hostile toward science.
When I was in high school,that revelation received further confirmation when I had a science teacher who was also the schools football coach who was too fucking busy coaching his football team to be teaching in the classroom, so he would set up the movie projector instead, and walk out of the class room, leaving us to sit in the dark watching stupid cartoons.
The quality of education in the USA has gone down the crapper, and this is probably why, so many from my generation, and the next generation became ultra-conservatard right-wing Republicans who have now joined the Tea Party!
Well . . . . .
FUCK YOU ALL!!!
I HOPE YOU ALL DIE FROM DRINKING THE POISON TEA!
Yeah! First it was the poison Kool Aid in Jones Town at Guyana back in 1978.
Soon, it will be the poison tea served by the Republicans.
I can see it coming!
I'm fat and sassy! I love to sing & dance & stomp my feet & really rock your world!
