Posts Tagged ‘objectivity’
What does “knowledge” depend on?
Beware of UFO In the consciousness of a scientifically-minded person, UFOs might seem like just another quirky, conspiratorial, psycho-social delusion to be analyzed from the safety of academic objectivity, and that was what we were lead to believe at the beginning of one of the draft essays we read at our September meeting. But partway…
Read MoreScientific genius—or not?
How do we as a society figure out if scientific genius is the real thing? What role should science writers play in celebrating or critiquing apparent scientific brilliance? What happens if we get it wrong? One of the most celebrated polymath geniuses of 20th-century America was the cosmologist/physicist/environmentalist/architect Buckminster Fuller. Yet doubts remain whether Fuller…
Read MoreThe entanglement of subject and object
Sir Isaac Newton thought light consisted of particles, until Thomas Young’s famous “double-slit experiment”, believed to have been performed in 1801, suggested that light actually took the form of waves. But this wasn’t a simple case of “scientific progress”, where an old idea was replaced by a new one. As the philosopher of science Karen…
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