Theos-Talk Archives (November 2000 Message tt00108)

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Giovanna

At 09:45 AM 11/14/00 -0800, you wrote:
> This is a
> beautiful epiloque by Roger G. Newton from his 1993 Harvard published
> book,  WHAT MAKES NATURE TICK.
>  
> He seems to have written a wonderful book
> explaining the mathematical essence of modern physics for those who seem
> to be outside looking into the field.  The epiloque is good evidence
> that one can speak from the heart using language forms that scientists
> understand and without resort to the symbolic language of
> "esoterics".  
>  
>  
>  
>  
> Quote:
>  
> In this book we have explored some parts of the
> elaborate structure of physics built by the imagination of many
> scientists in the course of the last 400 years.  Although this
> structure has an impressive, if imperfect coherence, it should not be
> considered as a revelation of the ultimate "truth" about
> nature.
>  
> Science is not holy scripture, nor do its
> practitioners consider themselves priests protecting a glittering grail,
> forever unchanging and pure.  What drives scientists on is the
> thirst to UNDERSTAND more than to USE(capitals are mine, EC) nature, to
> build rather that to exploit a comprehensible universe.
>  
> The future will, no doubt, bring many
> surprises, revealing some of our present ideas to be flawed or
> incomplete, but science must be a contiinuing activity; once its
> creativity is exhausted, our civilization will crumble and and we will
> return to the dark ages.  It cannot be sustained by technological
> ingenuity alone or by a routine search for and classification of more and
> more observations and phenomena.
>  
> I have endeavored to demonstrate that science,
> at the most fundamental level, is very far from being merely an efficient
> enumeration of experimental facts and empirical rules, nor is its
> structure simply determined by induction from observations.  To
> think of it only as an orderly collection of intriguing and useful bits
> of information is to misunderstand its cultural value and its fascination
> altogether.  Science is, in fact, an intricate edifice erected from
> complex, imaginative designs in which esthetics is a more powerful
> incentive than utility.  Beauty, finally, comprises its greatest
> intellectual appeal.
>  
> end quote.
>  
> This seems a good example of someone who's
> abstract mind is alive and well and living in Roger Newton.
>  
> Gene
>
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