Nov 21, 2016 11:19 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 21, 2016 11:32 PM by C C.)
Who Will Advise Trump on Science?
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ce/508055/
EXCERPT: [...] The appointment is crucial—as close to a cabinet-level position in science and technology as exists. “It’s an easy thing to say that it’s another bureaucratic office,” says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, “but it’s a critically important voice for the broader science community within the administration....”
When Science Went Modern
http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_arti...Daston.php
EXCERPT: [...] The aftershocks of all three of these earthquakes of modernity are still reverberating today: in heated debates, from Saudi Arabia to Sri Lanka to Senegal, about the significance of the Enlightenment for human rights and intellectual freedom; in the assessment of how science-driven technology and industrialization may have altered the climate of the entire planet; in anxious negotiations about nuclear disarmament and utopian visions of a global polity linked by the worldwide Net. No one denies the world-shaking and world-making significance of any of these three moments of scientific modernity.
Yet from the perspective of the scientists themselves, the experience of modernity coincides with none of these seismic episodes. The most unsettling shift in scientific self-understanding—about what science was and where it was going—began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, reaching its climax circa 1900. It was around that time that scientists began to wonder uneasily about whether scientific progress was compatible with scientific truth. If advances in knowledge were never-ending, could any scientific theory or empirical result count as real knowledge—true forever and always? Or was science, like the monarchies of Europe’s anciens régimes and the boundaries of its states and principalities, doomed to perpetual revision and revolution?
[...] These anxieties shaped the experience of modernity among scientists, starting in the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast with the intellectual exhilaration associated with the breakthroughs of the three previously delineated moments of modernity in the history of science, the experience of scientific modernity was disorienting, even frightening, for participants. If science was not about the discovery of eternal truths, what then was its raison d’être? If the achievements of one generation would almost certainly be overthrown by the next, and so on ad infinitum (or perhaps ad nauseam), what was the point of dedicating one’s life to such a Sisyphean task? These were the questions that haunted the scientists confronted with the specter of their own success, starting circa 1840. Although this moment of self-doubt does not align with any of the three moments of modernity in the history of science, I will argue that it captured a certain melancholy that has tinged our understanding of that term ever since....
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ce/508055/
EXCERPT: [...] The appointment is crucial—as close to a cabinet-level position in science and technology as exists. “It’s an easy thing to say that it’s another bureaucratic office,” says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, “but it’s a critically important voice for the broader science community within the administration....”
When Science Went Modern
http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_arti...Daston.php
EXCERPT: [...] The aftershocks of all three of these earthquakes of modernity are still reverberating today: in heated debates, from Saudi Arabia to Sri Lanka to Senegal, about the significance of the Enlightenment for human rights and intellectual freedom; in the assessment of how science-driven technology and industrialization may have altered the climate of the entire planet; in anxious negotiations about nuclear disarmament and utopian visions of a global polity linked by the worldwide Net. No one denies the world-shaking and world-making significance of any of these three moments of scientific modernity.
Yet from the perspective of the scientists themselves, the experience of modernity coincides with none of these seismic episodes. The most unsettling shift in scientific self-understanding—about what science was and where it was going—began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, reaching its climax circa 1900. It was around that time that scientists began to wonder uneasily about whether scientific progress was compatible with scientific truth. If advances in knowledge were never-ending, could any scientific theory or empirical result count as real knowledge—true forever and always? Or was science, like the monarchies of Europe’s anciens régimes and the boundaries of its states and principalities, doomed to perpetual revision and revolution?
[...] These anxieties shaped the experience of modernity among scientists, starting in the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast with the intellectual exhilaration associated with the breakthroughs of the three previously delineated moments of modernity in the history of science, the experience of scientific modernity was disorienting, even frightening, for participants. If science was not about the discovery of eternal truths, what then was its raison d’être? If the achievements of one generation would almost certainly be overthrown by the next, and so on ad infinitum (or perhaps ad nauseam), what was the point of dedicating one’s life to such a Sisyphean task? These were the questions that haunted the scientists confronted with the specter of their own success, starting circa 1840. Although this moment of self-doubt does not align with any of the three moments of modernity in the history of science, I will argue that it captured a certain melancholy that has tinged our understanding of that term ever since....
