Science – Page 8 – Wis[s]e Words

Steve Fuller – what an asshole

Published on November 9, 2009

I believe that Levitt’s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been as a pioneer of cyber-fascism, whereby a certain well-educated but (for whatever reason) academically disenfranchised group of people have managed to create their own parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science, which is backed up (at least at the moment) by nothing more than a steady stream of invective. Their resentment demands a scapegoat –and ‘postmodernists’ function as Jews had previously.

From Steve Fuller’s obituary of Norman Levitt in which he accuses him of wanting postmodernists like Fuller to be sent in unheated cattlecars to a death camp in Poland, gassed and the gold fillings pried out of their mouths before their corpses are burned in the gas ovens. Fuller would of course never put it like this, as that would show not just how grossly offensive, but also how absurd this comparison is. But that is what he’s implying, and for no better reason that that Levitt said nasty things about his work. Words have meanings, though it’s no great surprise that an intelligent design defender and socalled “postmodernist” like Fuller doesn’t understand that

Oh A. N. Wilson No!

Published on November 5, 2009

Driven Nutts by the debate on the sacking of the government’s drugs policy advisor, A. N. Wilson comes out with this gem on his way to an argument by Hitler:

The trouble with a ‘scientific’ argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.

Facts! As Richard Herring once said, “you can prove anything with facts”. No wonder A. N. Wilson is disdainful of them, of those scientists in their “university common rooms” and behind their “Hampstead dining tables “. They don’t have common sense, like A. N. Wilson has, the common sense that tells him scientists were wrong to trust the MRR vaccine, know global warming is real or believe in evolution. Scientists are arrogant and the new Catholic Inquisition because they beleive in research and facts and cannot bear to have anybody contradict them! Yeah!

Oh dear. And I quite enjoyed the Victorians and After the Victorians too. But what a great example of how crackpot ideas attract each other: global warming, MRR, evolution doubts — it’s like playing crackpot bingo.

UPDATE: I forgot that he also came out in favour of eugenics — sterilising the poor and feckless.

Supercontinent – Ted Nield

Published on October 5, 2009

Cover of supercontinent

Supercontinent
Ted Nield
288 pages, including index
Published in 2007

I’ve read other good books on geology and the history of the Earth, notably Richard Fortey’s books, but this is the best one volume introduction to the idea of continental drift and the underlying dynamics driving it that I’ve seen. Nield is very good at explaining difficult concepts to a lay reader without simplifying them into incoherence. I took a gamble on Supercontinent when I saw it in the Amsterdam library just because Nield chose to introduce his subject with a short science fiction story about what would be left of us if aliens visited Earth 200 million years from now, when our current continents have all recombined again to form one Supercontinent. A catchy way to get my attention and fully justified by the rest of the book.

Supercontinent is both about the geological history of Earth as expressed through the ways continents have drifted apart, collided and fused together and broken up again and the history of the intellectual discovery of this history. As you might expect from the relative shortness of this book, barely 270 pages not counting index and notes, Nield provides only a broad overview, but he has an eye for the telling detail and manages to pack a lot of explanation into few words. For example, below is how he explains the recurring opening and closing of the “Atlantic Ocean” in the process called introversion and how this leaves parts of mountain chains on different sides of the ocean:

In other words, oceans can open and close, like a carpenter’s vice, more than once. Imagine that you open a vice, put the carpenter’s lunch (cold lasagne) into it and squeeze it tight. The lunch will ooze out and up, forming a mountain chain, which we shall call the Lasagnides. You then leave it until the lasagne has gone hard before opening the vice again. By now agents of erosion — mice — have scoured the once mighty Lasagnides back to bench level; but their roots, within the vice itself, remain. If you now reopen the vice to start the process again, some of hose olde Lasagnide remnants will stick to one jaw and some to the other/ but the vice reopens along the same basic line. That is how you get some parts of the same mountain chain in Europe and others in America.

A beautiful day in the neighbourhood

Published on August 5, 2009

So won’t you be my neighbour?

The Solar Neighbourhood

The nearest stars to us, within a range of fifteen lightyears. For the time being that is, as don’t forget we’re all in our separate orbits around the Galaxy. Essential knowledge for any science fiction writer who wants to keep some semblance to reality. As is this, an exploration of the solar neighbourhood up to sixtyfive lightyears out. Via James, of course.

The New Solar System

Published on July 23, 20092 Comments

the new solar system. Credit to Mike Brown/Caltech

Over at Centauri Dreams, from which the above image was taken, they’re talking about missions to the outer planets, specially to Haumea. What struck me was how different our understanding of the Solar System is from the classical image of nine planets and some rubble I grew up with. It’s not until you get it all laid out like this that you realise just how different and how much more interesting the Solar System is. So where’s all the science fiction set in it? There’s Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War, now in a nice new US edition, but apart from that I can’t think of any other newish book set in our own system…