 Bruce
Bentzman's
Suburban Soliloquies # 11
~THE RISE AND FALL OF SCIENCE IN
SUBURBIA~
| "From
perhaps 100,000 people with axes to more than
four billion with bombs, rocket ships,
cities, televisions, and computers - and all
without substantial genetic change."
- Stephen Jay Gould |
I thought myself born into
the "modern" age. According to my
schooling, it seemed all the wickedness of
superstition and ignorance was in the past, or in
foreign countries, and we were taught that we lived
in an age of enlightenment and hope. Growing up in
the Fifties and Sixties, I confused technology for
science and regarded Disneyland, or the 1964 New York
World’s Fair as models of the coming Utopia that
I would live to see.
At the World’s Fair - "Peace through
Understanding" its theme - I watched a man in a
white lab coat reach into a clear beaker of liquid
and pull from it a nylon cord. So science was magic
and the lab coat was the new wizard’s uniform,
the thermometer and slide rule his magic wands.
Better living through chemistry!
At another pavilion I had my penny irradiated and
returned to me. Now, when I passed it under the
Geiger counter the instrument would sing out in a
flood of clicks. For months after I carried that
penny for good luck in my right hip pocket.
I rode on a moving chair through General Motors’
Futurama where their future was modelled in dioramas.
They presented a giant tractor-truck chewing its way
through the evil Amazon jungle, doing away with that
disease filled, bug-infested, wasteland, and in its
wake that wonderful, smoking, blinking, grinding
tractor-truck left a paved highway, like a
slug’s trail. The climax of the ride was the
city of the future, a dense city of uncanny shapes
that did not intervene with high-speed
transportation. I couldn’t wait.
| "The
fact that reality rarely is what you want it
to be is the best evidence that a world
beyond our heads does indeed exist!"-
Victor J. Stenger |
In 1963, when I was all of
twelve, I told my sixth grade teacher that Man would
be on the moon by 1980. She punished me for my
arrogance.
| "It
is by forgoing the comforts of false
certitude that scientists muddle their way to
the truth." - Timothy Ferris |
In the summer of 1965,
several friends and I commuted into Philadelphia once
a week to attend lectures on Astronautics at the
Franklin Institute. After the lectures we had the
entire science museum to ourselves before it opened
to the public. We played a version of hide-and-seek,
when a few of us would suddenly disappear down one of
numerous hidden staircases. The poor fellow who had
been abandoned would then go racing through the long
halls of exhibits in search of the deserters. We also
competed in timed races through the human heart, a
two-story model made of fiberglass and rubber that
allowed visitors to walk through following the route
taken by blood. Alan, now a Computer Scientist for
Lucent Technologies, was the unsurpassed champion.
Good Science is a spiritual pursuit of the knowable
truth. Science is amoral, as distinct from immoral.
When evil people use Science to wicked ends, it gives
Science a bad name. It is no different when evil
people use Religion to wicked ends.
| "The
greatest derangement of the mind is to
believe in something because one wishes it to
be so."- Louis Pasteur |
Today Science has taken a
different turn. Many Scientists are supporting
biodiversity by suggesting the placing of limits and
restrictions on development, consumption, and
consumerism. It is no longer the modern age into
which I was born. All the wickedness of superstition
and ignorance is on the rise; Science illiteracy
results in creationism, ufology, astrology,
homeopathy, to name a few. For what reasons do school
boards and taxpayers wish to undermine the critical
thinking of an education in Science? I can only think
of one. The ignorant can be exploited, either as
consumers, or as voters.
|