well, I do NOT think "science" needs another Carl Sagan. I had thought so before I saw the way he behaved in public. He was sooo pro science, that his molecules mattered more than psychology. This was clearly too restrictive, to my mind. But I do not think that we need a next generation Carl Zimmer either (see the latest issue of SCIENCE where he writes on Viruses and DNA) but then again I would be "bad" scientist if I am wrong about Carl and not correct about myself. Does the ability to get a "news" article in SCIENCE make Zimmer a scientist & me in consequentia not?
I dont mind if people want to try to discuss me at all here. I will not get mad but below is what I think about it. I think Quetzal is closer when he worries about elitism. There is a crossover between specialization, socialization, and professionalism that I cross fairly quickly here, and if SCIENCE itself is being authorized by elites than there is room for worry , it seems to me.
I am definitely “doing” it, whatever it is that I “do” ,’outside’ the academy, but right next to those in it such that one reading me in context would be hard pressed to notice (the) any difference. Kant, while putting the parts he realized could come together in the Conflict of the Faculties noticed the good thing that “universities” were where they were institutions that “made” doctors (phds) but he also recognized that the phd kind of work, could occur by “layman” as well, those not professionally affiliated with a given such institution, provided they cared for and were concerned with the same subjects otherwise becoming conferred.
When there is some issue of about “elitism” or the difficulty of the strech between a freshman course in a scientific subject well done by a stundent and the actual work of research scientists and post-docs etc, there is a
social aspect other than the simple quantity of time necessary to “know” all of the relevant things. Most higher learning however is simply a matter of time and devotion to the topic rather than some skill that separates off the very cream of the best in a given. Specialization makes this somewhat a necssisty. Clearly those who have not achieved up to the highest levels can be frustrated with pronouncements coming from the seeming “on high” but if this is merely something that is matter of time or schooling (Harvard schooled profs love to lord it over Cornell students and faculty to a rather annoying degree, but justified more often than not. I am thinking of Strogatz in math and I think Simon Levin made a smart move leaving Cornell for Princeton etc) then ,the enunciations that appear no matter if the social factor is also involved to be less discrete than “correctness” calls for, *might* be ok.
Now there is the social factor, and that more than simply the level of difficulty in the amount of time, that is really the problem and this CAN cut across most of the academy, especially that which is relevant to object of EVC conversations. There is a somewhat clearly visible and intellectually labelable secularity to higher education and *this* when it comes to calling someone like me as NOT being a scientist is really kinda wrong.
I am not as well rounded as your average graduate of any ivy league school but I am extremely well, more self than not, trained in reading biology. This was a conscious choice I made and contine to differentiate my life with but I am doing it OUTSIDE the standard, traditional and actual means currently made as economical as possible by univeristites and colleges more than other institutions. I consider my self to be a scientist. I am constantly thinking through the history of biology and tyring to develop ways to test ideas both of my own conception and falsify those of others that might appear at first blush to be of a different color than the rule of law I think I see as causally necessary etc.
So unless the issue of what makes a scientist is to say that theory is not science, that empirical bench work but not paper and ink is science, then OK I might not be a scientist ,(I had always since a teenager labeled my self as a “natural historian”)but I shall give an example to show how much MORE I must do just to maintain the same relation to history that one in the academy must and can do with less psychological burden thus in my view deflating any gain it would ever make to allow scientists to be “elite” as Sharf wanted to say later.
http://www.asa3.org/asa/PSCF/1993/PSCF3-93Hedman.html
At this web site the author wrote,
quote:
Cantor's Universe Not Necessitarian
An incontingent world view regards the universe as having a necessary structure, as being uniquely determined by just the requirement of self-consistency. All phenomena in principle could be deduced from its system of basic laws. A contingent universe does not contain within itself a sufficient explanation of itself, and so cannot be understood simply by a priori reasoning. In his writings about the nature of the universe Cantor was deeply conscious of its contingent character. Following Leibnitz, Cantor thought of the universe as being built up from two kinds of elementary units: corporeal (matter) and ethereal (ether) monads. Cantor held that transfinites exist in concreto in a nevertheless temporal, bounded universe, because there are a transfinite number of such monads. Cantor further believed that the cardinality of the corporeal monads was Aleph-Null, and of ethereal monads was Aleph-One, his "First World Hypothesus." But in spite of his philosophical investment, Cantor was careful to stress that God did not necessarily have to create the universe in this or any other way.39 The existence of the transfinities in the mind did not even necessarily depend upon their realization in the physical universe..
This drawing out of the issue of contingency is definitely an advance over the work of Dauben that is cited in the references. But the writing goes way beyond the science that the work attempts to discuss. Cantor is against the positivism that Kant’s work lead to NOT to what is ostensibly exposed by Cantor’s thoughts on reality. So in order to get a definite stance on contingency this author had cashed in Cantor’s thoughts BEYOND the original organic nature that Kant exposed and Cantor sought to provide math for, for his own historicization of science itself. What this author did not try to do was to see what, if anything, the first world hypothesis, might mean, in today’s science. If, in other words, it actually provides a theoretical position other than contingent leanings, that can change the work of scientists for a better yesterday, specifically in correspondence with Mittag-Leffler who said that Cantor was 100 years ahead of his time, when it came to order types. Bertrand Russell refused to follow this direction of Cantor deciding to think about what counts as proof in math harder than others after Cantor instead. Godel however opened this back up but in ways that are still not being taught in the most difficult courses even if, (I am not in these classes to actually know), they might be dismissed as not socially / secularly needed, even if they are. The author did not realize that biology itself might be a science composed of Aleph-tw0 point sets whereas traditional chemistry and physics is only Aleph -One (according to Cantor (not me)) thus he did not find out that for instance Faraday’s question as to if an electric fish could be both a conductor and an insulator might be answered from a science of Cantor conception, in that TIME. He did not look hard at the relation of chemistry to electricity nor the notions of macrothermodyanmics as different than phenomenological thermodynamics so he could re-read Gould’s contingency in biological change on his own interpretative basis.
These are all things that can and do do but you will not find them anywhere in the academy that I know of. As soon as they are I will have a job but because this projection of my own doing is wider than secualarism and is not out of filiation with creationism I can not find this work IN the university setting, nor among the people I meet in Ithaca. That is why I am doing this all on-line. But I will not all of a sudden become a “scientist” as soon as this kind of thinking finds a chair somewhere to which grad students are writing theses for. If I am going to become a scientists this way, I would have already been one. That is the only way this makes sense. The other fate is that I am just ”crazy’ to think that what I do will EVER find a legit output. I personally don’t need to worry about this as I already know it does. It works for me, all politics aside.
This ability to read science this way IS however contrary to what counts as elite commentary ON SCIENCE so it can easily be mistaken taken that what I am talking about is not “science” but then what I am doing would already be past, and that it barely is.
Edited by Brad McFall, : error of content
Edited by Brad McFall, : commas, etc
Edited by Brad McFall, : wrong infinte number denotation
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