What a group: Day, Greene, Flatow, Tyson, Krauss, Dawkins, Nye, Stephenson

Tracy Day, Brian Greene (standing), Ira Flatow, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, and Neal Stephenson at Arizona State University for the Origins Project's Origins Stories weekend.

"Neil deGrasse Tyson on Van Gogh's Role in Space Exploration and Other Great Tales of Science"

by

Torie Bosch

April 1st, 2013

Slate

Science panels don’t normally involve a striptease, even a G-rated one.

But on Saturday, March 30, Neil deGrasse Tyson took off his shirt to prove a point about the stars, science, and art.

It happened at Arizona State University during “The Science of Storytelling,” a panel featuring Tyson, Science Friday’s Ira Flatow, World Science Festival Executive Director Tracy Day, physicist Brian Greene, atheism rock star Richard Dawkins, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and host Lawrence Krauss.

ASU’s Origins Project, which is directed by Krauss, sponsored the panel as part of a series of weekend events celebrating science, reason, and stories. (Disclosure: ASU is a partner with Slate and the New America Foundation in Future Tense, and Krauss is a regular Future Tense contributor.) As part of the festivities, the radio show Science Friday broadcast live from ASU, and there was also a Friday night screening of and discussion about The Unbelievers, a documentary following Krauss and Dawkins as they travel the world to promote atheism and skeptical thinking. Cameron Diaz, who appears briefly in The Unbelievers, even took to the stage with Krauss, Dawkins, and authors Ian McEwan and Cormac McCarthy to discuss the film. (Upon introducing Diaz to the audience, Krauss remarked that he initially met her at World Science Fest a few years back—and during their first conversation, he apologized to her for having been surprised to see her there.)

In his opening remarks at “The Science of Storytelling” on Saturday, Krauss said, “One of the things I like to tell students … not all the problems are solved. There’s still an incredible need to understand things in the universe.” By telling the human stories behind the science, we can stop making it feel like something that was “done by dead white men.” Accordingly, each panelist told a tale (or several) about science—and that’s where Tyson’s shirt comes in.

Tyson was riffing on a familiar theme: art’s relationship with science. For eons, he said, artists had a responsibility to paint primarily what they saw. But with the advent of photography—science!—“it was no longer the obligation of the artist to capture reality.” That’s when he shucked his beige button-down to display a T-shirt bearing Van Gogh’s Starry Night. (Tyson’s office at the American Museum of Natural History boasts both a Starry Night print and a Starry Night pillow, which he showed off in a Science Friday video in March 2012.)

Van Gogh, he said,

    didn’t call the painting Sleepy Village, Cypress Tree, Church Steeple, Hills. It is the first painting that I know of … [in which] the background is the subject of the painting, and that background is the night sky, and it [has] elevated the cosmos to become fair game to the artist. I submit to you that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not become mainstream until the artists embrace the fruits of those discoveries. So I applaud Vincent van Gogh for thinking that the sky is what mattered more than anything in the foreground for this painting.

Tyson famously criticized director James Cameron over the night sky portrayed in Titanic as the ship sinks. After receiving a “snarky” email from Tyson, Cameron corrected the stars for the film’s 10th anniversary rerelease. So, Tyson said at ASU, people have often asked him why he doesn’t object to the untrue-to-life celestial bodies seen in Starry Night.
 
I was asked, given how nitpicky I was about the wrong sky over Kate Winslet as she floated on that plank … what do I think about the Van Gogh sky? Clearly that’s not accurate. My reply was, “In the case of the artist, I don’t want them to represent reality because I have that via my own telescopes. I want and need the artist to take me to new places, and the new place that Van Gogh took me not the sky as it is but the sky as he felt it. And the more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.”

As he wrapped up, Krauss interjected, “You notice that Pluto is not on this shirt.”

“Get over it,” shot back Tyson, who has confessed to “driv[ing] the getaway car” in Pluto’s demotion from planetary status.

Much of the evening was devoted to pointing out just how straight-up cool science is—and the 3,000-person crowd reveled in it, especially during raucous disputes between panelists over space privatization, math as the “language of the universe,” and whether we could ever find out what consciousness really is. During a particularly contentious bout, Tyson stood up as if to go after Greene—and Nye held him back as Greene fled.

But the panelists turned serious at moments. “If we only talk about how fun science is, we don’t do it justice,” Dawkins said. In recognition of one of science’s less-admirable facets, Krauss concluded the night with a frank acknowledgment: that Tracy Day was the only woman on the eight-person panel. Krauss said that he hopes that that won’t be the case much longer. The speakers were “the old guard,” Krauss said. “And I’m hoping that we will encourage young women to go into science and go into communicating about science so when we have this panel in the future, we’ll have an all-female panel.”

That would be a story worth hearing.


Astronomy...art

Astronomy--forensics

Van Gogh's mystery star at the White House

Philosophy vs science...Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss dialog

"Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?"

Philosopher Julian Baggini fears that, as we learn more and more about the universe, scientists are becoming increasingly determined to stamp their mark on other disciplines. Here, he challenges theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss over 'mission creep' among his peers
by

Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss

September 8th, 2012   
   
The Observer

Julian Baggini 

No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science. When physics is compared with the humanities and social sciences, it is easy for the scientists to feel smug and the rest of us to feel somewhat envious. Philosophers in particular can suffer from lab-coat envy. If only our achievements were so clear and indisputable! How wonderful it would be to be free from the duty of constantly justifying the value of your discipline.

However – and I'm sure you could see a "but" coming – I do wonder whether science hasn't suffered from a little mission creep of late. Not content with having achieved so much, some scientists want to take over the domain of other disciplines.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. Science was once natural philosophy and psychology sat alongside metaphysics. But there are some issues of human existence that just aren't scientific. I cannot see how mere facts could ever settle the issue of what is morally right or wrong, for example.

Some of the things you have said and written suggest that you share some of science's imperialist ambitions. So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

Lawrence Krauss  

Thanks for the kind words about science and your generous attitude. As for your "but" and your sense of my imperialist ambitions, I don't see it as imperialism at all. It's merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science.

Getting to your question of morality, for example, science provides the basis for moral decisions, which are sensible only if they are based on reason, which is itself based on empirical evidence. Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs.

The chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home. This is particularly relevant in physics and cosmology. Vague philosophical debates about cause and effect, and something and nothing, for example – which I have had to deal with since my new book appeared – are very good examples of this. One can debate until one is blue in the face what the meaning of "non-existence" is, but while that may be an interesting philosophical question, it is really quite impotent, I would argue. It doesn't give any insight into how things actually might arise and evolve, which is really what interests me.
 
JB 

I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I agree that many traditional questions of metaphysics are now best approached by scientists and you do a brilliant job of arguing that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is one of them. But we are missing something if we say, as you do, that the "chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home". I think you say this because you endorse a principle that the key distinction is between empirical questions that are answerable and non-empirical ones that aren't.

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions. We can think better about them and can even have more informed debates by learning new facts. What we conclude about animal ethics, for example, has changed as we have learned more about non-human cognition.

What is disparagingly called scientism insists that, if a question isn't amenable to scientific solution, it is not a serious question at all. I would reply that it is an ineliminable feature of human life that we are confronted with many issues that are not scientifically tractable, but we can grapple with them, understand them as best we can and we can do this with some rigour and seriousness of mind.

It sounds to me as though you might not accept this and endorse the scientistic point of view. Is that right?

LK 

In fact, I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I do think philosophical discussions can inform decision-making in many important ways, by allowing reflections on facts, but that ultimately the only source of facts is via empirical exploration. And I agree with you that there are many features of human life for which decisions are required on issues that are not scientifically tractable. Human affairs and human beings are far too messy for reason alone, and even empirical evidence, to guide us at all stages. I have said I think Lewis Carroll was correct when suggesting, via Alice, the need to believe several impossible things before breakfast. We all do it every day in order to get out of bed – perhaps that we like our jobs, or our spouses, or ourselves for that matter.

Where I might disagree is the extent to which this remains time-invariant. What is not scientifically tractable today may be so tomorrow. We don't know where the insights will come from, but that is what makes the voyage of discovery so interesting. And I do think factual discoveries can resolve even moral questions.

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong". In fact, I think you actually accede to this point about the impact of science when you argue that our research into non-human cognition has altered our view of ethics.

I admit I am pleased to have read that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question best addressed by scientists. But, in this regard, as I have argued that "why" questions are really "how" questions, would you also agree that all "why" questions have no meaning, as they presume "purpose" that may not exist?
 
JB 

It would certainly be foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that what now appears to be a non-factual question might one day be answered by science. But it's also important to be properly sceptical about how far we anticipate science being able to go. If not, then we might be too quick to turn over important philosophical issues to scientists prematurely.

Your example of homosexuality is a case in point. I agree that the main reasons for thinking it is wrong are linked with outmoded ways of thought. But the way you put it, it is because science shows us that homosexual behaviour "is completely natural", "has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts", is "biologically based" and "not harmful" that we can conclude it is "not innately 'wrong'". But this mixes up ethical and scientific forms of justification. Homosexuality is morally acceptable, but not for scientific reasons. Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural. There have been claims, for example, that rape is both natural and has evolutionary advantages. But the people who made those claims were also at great pains to stress this did not make them right – efforts that critics sadly ignored. Similar claims have been made for infidelity. What science tells us about the naturalness of certain sexual behaviours informs ethical reflection, but does not determine its conclusions. We need to be clear on this. It's one thing to accept that one day these issues might be better addressed by scientists than philosophers, quite another to hand them over prematurely.

LK  

Once again, there are only subtle disagreements. We have an intellect and can therefore override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony. However, I think that science can either modify or determine our moral convictions. The fact that infidelity, for example, is a fact of biology must, for any thinking person, modify any "absolute" condemnation of it. Moreover, that many moral convictions vary from society to society means that they are learned and, therefore, the province of psychology. Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired – a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

I want to change the subject. I admit I am pleased that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing" is a question best addressed by scientists. But I claim more generally that the only meaningful "why" questions are really "how" questions. Do you agree?

Let me give an example to put things in context. Astronomer Johannes Kepler claimed in 1595 to answer an important "why" question: why are there six planets? The answer, he believed, lay in the five Platonic solids whose faces can be composed of regular polygons – triangles, squares, etc – and which could be circumscribed by spheres whose size would increase as the number of faces increased. If these spheres then separated the orbits of the planets, he conjectured, perhaps their relative distances from the sun and their number could be understood as revealing, in a deep sense, the mind of God.

"Why" was then meaningful because its answer revealed purpose to the universe. Now, we understand the question is meaningless. We not only know there are not six planets, but moreover that our solar system is not unique, nor necessarily typical. The important question then becomes: "How does our solar system have the number of planets distributed as it does?" The answer to this question might shed light on the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe, for example. Not only has "why" become "how" but "why" no longer has any useful meaning, given that it presumes purpose for which there is no evidence.
 
JB 

I don't know whether it's a virtue or a vice, but in philosophy there is nothing "only" about subtle disagreements! But given we've got as close as we're probably going to on ethics, let's turn to the difference between "how" and "why" questions.

Again, I agree with a lot here. I am unpersuaded, for example, by the argument that there is never any conflict between religion and science because the latter deals with "how" questions and the former "why" ones. The two cannot be so easily disentangled. If a Christian argues that God explains why there was a big bang, then that inevitably says something about God's role in how the universe came into being, too. But I would not go so far as to say that all "why" questions can only be properly understood as "how" ones. The clearest example here is of human action, for which adequate explanations can rarely do without "why" questions. We do things for reasons.

Some very hard-nosed philosophers and scientists describe this as a convenient fiction, an illusion. They claim the real explanation for human action lies at the level of "how", specifically, how brains receive information, process it and then produce action.

But if we want to know why someone made a sacrifice for a person close to them, a purely neurological answer would not be a complete one. The full truth would require saying that there was a "why" at work, too: love. Love is indeed at root the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones. How the biochemical and psychological points of view fit together is clearly puzzling, and, as your aside on free will suggests, our naive assumptions about human freedom are almost certainly false. But we have no reason to think that one day science will make it unnecessary for us to ask "why" questions about human action to which things such as love will be the answer. Or is that romantic tosh? Is there no reason why you're bothering to have this conversation, that you are doing it simply because your brain works the way it does?

LK 

Well, I am certainly enjoying the conversation, which is apparently "why" I am doing it. However, I know that my enjoyment derives from hard-wired processes that make it enjoyable for humans to tangle linguistically and philosophically. I guess I would have to turn your question around and ask why (if you will excuse the "why" question!) you think that things such as love will never be reducible to the firing of neurons and biochemical reactions? For that not to be the case, there would have to be something beyond the purely "physical" that governs our consciousness. I guess I see nothing that suggests this is the case. Certainly, we already understand many aspects of sacrifice in terms of evolutionary biology. Sacrifice is, in many cases, good for survival of a group or kin. It makes evolutionary sense for some people, in this case to act altruistically, if propagation of genes is driving action in a basic sense. It is not a large leap of the imagination to expect that we will one day be able to break down those social actions, studied on a macro scale, to biological reactions at a micro scale.

In a purely practical sense, this may be computationally too difficult to do in the near future, and maybe it will always be so, but everything I know about the universe makes me timid to use the word always. What isn't ruled out by the laws of physics is, in some sense, inevitable. So, right now, I cannot imagine that I could computationally determine the motion of all the particles in the room in which I am breathing air, so that I have to take average quantities and do statistics in order to compute physical behaviour. But, one day, who knows?

JB 

Who knows? Indeed. Which is why philosophy needs to accept it may one day be made redundant. But science also has to accept there may be limits to its reach.

I don't think there is more stuff in the universe than the stuff of physical science. But I am sceptical that human behaviour could ever be explained by physics or biology alone. Although we are literally made of the same stuff as stars, that stuff has organised itself so complexly that things such as consciousness have emerged that cannot be fully understood only by examining the bedrock of bosons and fermions. At least, I think they can't. I'm happy for physicists to have a go. But, until they succeed, I think they should refrain from making any claims that the only real questions are scientific questions and the rest is noise. If that were true, wouldn't this conversation just be noise too?

LK  

We can end in essential agreement then. I suspect many people think many of my conversations are just noise, but, in any case, we won't really know the answer to whether science can yield a complete picture of reality, good at all levels, unless we try. You and I agree fundamentally that physical reality is all there is, but we merely have different levels of optimism about how effectively and how completely we can understand it via the methods of science. I continue to be surprised by the progress that is possible by continuing to ask questions of nature and let her answer through experiment. Stars are easier to understand than people, I expect, but that is what makes the enterprise so exciting. The mysteries are what make life worth living and I would be sad if the day comes when we can no longer find answerable questions that have yet to be answered, and puzzles that can be solved. What surprises me is how we have become victims of our own success, at least in certain areas. When it comes to the universe as a whole, we may be frighteningly close to the limits of empirical inquiry as a guide to understanding. After that, we will have to rely on good ideas alone, and that is always much harder and less reliable.

The Ego Trick

by

Julian Baggini

ISBN-10: 1847081924
ISBN-13: 978-1847081926

A Universe From Nothing
by

Lawrence M Krauss

ISBN-10: 145162445X
ISBN-13: 978-1451624458

 

Julian Baggini [Wikipedia]

Lawrence M. Krauss [Wikipedia]

Post modern philosophy of science and science

"Is Science 'Forever Tentative' and 'Socially Constructed'? No Way!"

by

David H. Bailey and Jonathan M. Borwein

June 7th, 2012

The Huffington Post

Introduction

In "postmodern science studies" or "postmodern philosophy of science," scholars critique science and mathematics from a high-level meta-perspective. Two of these writers, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, in the view of many scientists, have significant merit and are worth taking seriously, although both published their most influential books 50 years ago.

Karl Popper

Popper (1902-1994) declared in The Logic of Scientific Discovery [Popper 1959, pg. 40-41], "It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience." Popper's ideas on falsifiability remain highly influential in scientific research to the present day. For example, various prominent scientists have recently questioned whether it is prudent to continue pursuing string theory, given practitioners have not been able to derive testable consequences after 25 years of effort [Smolin 2006, pg. 352].

Popper's ideas have limitations, some pointed out by Popper himself. In modern-day science, major theories are seldom falsified by a single experiment. There are always questions regarding experimental design, measurement procedures, data analysis and error statistics. Multiple follow-on studies are necessary to conclusively decide the hypothesis one way or the other. The recent "faster than light" neutrino measurements at CERN provides an illuminating case study.

Moreover in most cases, modern "falsified" theories continue to be extremely accurate within appropriate domains. Even today, over 100 years after Newton's mechanics and Maxwell's electromagnetic equations were "falsified" and supplanted by new physics, they remain the basis of almost all practical engineering and scientific computations, giving results practically indistinguishable from modern theories.

Thomas Kuhn

Another hugely influential postmodernist author is Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). His seminal 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions analyzed numerous historical cases of scientific advancements, and argued compellingly that periods of normal science were interrupted by key paradigm shifts in which old ideas were abandoned [Kuhn 1970]. He likened shifts to "religious experiences" which do not come easily.

Kuhn was a trained scientist with a 1949 Harvard physics Ph.D., and was able to bring significant technical insight to his analyses of historical scientific revolutions. Sadly, the term "paradigm shift" is vastly over-used, and Kuhn's writings, much as Popper's, have been badly misused by a host of eager amateurs thinking they can smash the reigning orthodoxies of modern science.

In a newly published posthumous fiftieth-anniversary interview of Kuhn by Scientific American writer John Horgan, Kuhn was deeply upset he had become a patron saint to such would-be scientific revolutionaries: "I get a lot of letters saying, 'I've just read your book, and it's transformed my life. I'm trying to start a revolution. Please help me,' and accompanied by a book-length manuscript." [Horgan 2012].

More recent postmodern writings

More recent post-modern science studies have over-zealously extended the scope of their critiques, declaring that much of modern science, like literary and historical analysis, is "socially constructed," dependent on the social and political environment of the researchers, with no claim to fundamental truth [Koertge 1998, pg. 258].

Scientists counter that these scholars have distorted a few historical controversies, and have parlayed these to a global condemnation of the scientific enterprise [Gross 1998]. What's more the postmodern science literature abounds with: (a) serious confusion on technical issues; (b) politically charged rhetoric; (c) lengthy discussions of mathematical or scientific principles of which the author has only hazy familiarity; (d) applications of highly sophisticated concepts from mathematics or physics where they don't apply; (e) text peppered with sophisticated technical terms or mathematical formulas and vacuous technical passages [Sokal 1998, pg 4-5; SkepticalTeacher].

The Sokal hoax

Tension between scientific and postmodernist communities came to a head in 1996, when Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, wrote a parody postmodern science article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," and submitted it to Social Text, a prominent postmodern studies field journal [Sokal 1996a].

The article was filled with pages of erudite-sounding nonsense, political rhetoric, irrelevant references to arcane science, and approving quotations from leading postmodern science scholars. In spite of its clear flaws, the article was not only accepted, but appeared in a special issue devoted to defending the legitimacy of postmodern science studies against its detractors.

Sokal had resorted to the hoax to highlight his concern that postmodern science has rejected the Enlightenment which identified with science and rationalism and rejected such obscurantism.

"Theorizing about 'the social construction of reality' won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics, and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity." [Lingua 2000, pg. 52].

In the same issue as Sokal, a prominent postmodernist (seriously) wrote:

Once it is acknowledged that the West does not have a monopoly on all the good scientific ideas in the world, ... then can we begin to talk about different ways of doing science, ways that downgrade methodology, experiment, and manufacturing in favor of local environments, cultural values, and principles of social justice. [ Ross 1996, pg. 3-4].

Imagine if this extreme cultural relativism were widely adopted in modern science and society. A few years ago the Mexican government encouraged potters, for their safety, to use lead-free glazes, but the local potters were convinced that this was a foreign conspiracy. Unfortunately, as Michael Sullivan has noted, "lead does not care who believes what." [Sullivan 1996]. South Africa's experience with AIDS also shows how destructive of human life ill-educated views of "imperialist scientific plots" can be.

So where are we 50 years on?

The consensus of scientists is that post Kuhn and Popper, "postmodern science studies" have not advanced scientific research (or much else), and even their own writings have often been misappropriated. As biologist Paul Gross wrote [Gross 1996, pg. 50]:

    "The dictum that everything that people do is 'cultural' ... licenses the idea that every cultural critic can meaningfully analyze even the most intricate accomplishments of art and science. ... It is distinctly weird to listen to pronouncements on the nature of mathematics from the lips of someone who cannot tell you what a complex number is!"

Similarly, Canadian-American physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote that "philosophical speculations about physics and the nature of science are not particularly useful, and have had little or no impact upon progress in my field" [Krauss2012 ].

One broad criticism is that post-modernist scholars work almost entirely from outside the realm of real scientific research. Unlike predecessors such as Kuhn and Popper, most do not have substantial scientific training and/or credentials; do not address state-of-the-art scientific theories or methods in significant technical depth; and do not participate with scientific research teams in performing peer-reviewed scientific research.

Their approach is best exemplified by a comment made by a leading postmodern writer in the introduction to one of his works: "This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them." [Ross 1991].

However, such writers cannot possibly hope to have tangible impact in the scientific enterprise, since real scientific work is all about the details -- experimental design, careful execution, analysis of results. And when leading figures in this community openly express their contempt for day-to-day scientific work, they are not building bridges that will lead to productive collaborations with real scientists in the future.

Maybe one day the tide will turn, opening the way for a more respectful dialogue between science and philosophy. As physicist Carlos Rovelli recently wrote, "I believe [we] can teach one another enormously." Philosopher Tim Maudlin expressed similar views in his 2007 book The Metaphysics within Physics. In any event, the modern scientific method taking its full form after the Enlightenment has been astonishingly successful, as anyone who has ever been treated for a major once incurable disease can attest. While no knowledge may be certain, modern science comes remarkably close.

"Living popular scientist" poll

Who is your choice for living "popular" scientist?

Brian Greene...0
Freeman Dyson...3
Lawrence Krauss...0
Neil deGrasse Tyson...2
Stephen Hawking...3

Somewhat surprised. I suppose Hawking would lead...he is quite an icon. I expected Krauss to be at the bottom...claim to fame mostly with the physics of "Star Trek". But I did think that Greene would be favored with his "Elegant Universe" material. Tyson may have shot himself in the foot with the Pluto statement. Dyson is for older individuals expressing a little more wisdom.

Brian Greene:

"Put a Little Science in Your Life"...please

Freeman Dyson:

A birthday celebration today-- Freeman Dyson...#85

Freeman Dyson--optimist

Lawrence Krauss:

Krauss & Jeremijenko on a date and discuss science

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Neil deGrasse Tyson...new representative

Neil deGrasse Tyson..."NOVA scienceNow"--2nd season

Pluto, Tyson, CNN lecture

"The Pluto Files" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tyson, Weintraub, Tombaugh & Pluto

Tyson's interview with "Time" on Pluto and planets

Stephen Hawking:

Another review of Stephen and Lucy Hawking's children's book

"George's Secret Key to the Universe"--Stephen Hawking & daughter Lucy

Hawking, Einstein, Africa

Hawking--England or Canada...makes no difference

Job application...Lucasian professor of mathematics

Peter Higgs vs Stephen Hawking

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

S. Hawking documentary

S. Hawking to Canada

Stephen Hawking's warnings

Space exploration?...Stephen Hawking's perspective

Stephen Hawking..."Master of the Universe"--documentary


Popularization of science

Faith/science--mutually exclusive?

Interesting. This is a prepublish paper by Richard MacKenzie. We are still fussing over the epistemological relationship between faith and science and it appears that people still wish to draw the conclusion that science and religion [theology] are mutually exclusive. I disagree, but you may draw your own conclusions. Presented below is MacKenzie's paper and a response from Lawrence M. Krauss.

Abstract:

In this article, inspired by Lawrence Krauss' plenary talk at the 2007 CAP congress, the relation between faith and science is examined. Some readers of this article may have seen Lawrence Krauss' entertaining and thoughtprovoking plenary talk at the 2007 CAP congress in Saskatoon. They may remember that the first individual to raise a hand during the question period did so in an almost-Horshackian fashion, and that he bluntly asserted that he disagreed strongly with the following statement made by Krauss on the challenge of teaching science to the public:

Faith is not the enemy.
Ignorance is the enemy.

That brazen individual was me, and I would like to explain why I disagree with this statement- to the point where I would be inclined to go so far as to interchange the words "faith" and "ignorance." Let us recall that Krauss’ talk, entitled "Selling Science to Unwilling Buyers," concerned itself with how to teach science to the general public - the unwilling buyer - by discussing applications of science which interest the buyer, rather than more traditional “bottom-up” approaches to teaching science which might themselves be partly responsible for the preconception that science is boring in the first place. Krauss talked about the current (and abysmal) state of scientific illiteracy in the US, its underlying causes, and how to improve the situation. In giving such a talk to an audience of physicists, Krauss was to a large extent preaching to the converted, and I myself was entirely in agreement with everything he said, except for the above quote, which I found surprisingly discordant with the rest of his talk.

"Is Faith The Enemy Of Science?"

Lawrence M. Krauss reply

Krauss & Jeremijenko on a date and discuss science

Lawrence Krauss

Natalie Jeremijenko

Lawrence Krauss and Natalie Jeremijenko are on a date and discuss "science"...hehe.

Wikipedia:

Natalie Jeremijenko

Lawrence Krauss


Dinner date