Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!hao!oddjob!uwvax!dogie!uwmcsd1!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!markh
From: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Newsgroups: sci.misc
Subject: Re: Omni-Americans
Message-ID: <5167@uwmcsd1.UUCP>
Date: 10 Mar 88 05:16:58 GMT
References: <5017@uwmcsd1.UUCP> <2790@gryphon.CTS.COM> <1221@uop.edu> <5143@uwmcsd1.UUCP> <1077@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Sender: daemon@uwmcsd1.UUCP
Reply-To: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Lines: 88
Summary: Some responses.  Read the NAS monthly.

In article <1077@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> lindsay@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (Donald Lindsay) writes:
>This is getting ripe.

Thank you for your apology, because there is a lot for you to apologize for
in your posting.

>In article <5143@uwmcsd1.UUCP> markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes:
>
>>     (1) DeBroglie writes a two page thesis discussing the matter-wave
>>         duality.
    ....
>>	 It took Einstein having seen the paper for it to be rescued.
>
>Thank you for demonstrating that it is the scientists who are creative and
>who are open to new paradigms. 

... and who else would I have been talking about?  Just what are you assuming
anyway?

>
>>         And even
>>	 today Physicists get around having to accept the implications
>>	 of the theory by the old trick: "well Newton was right to a
>>	 first approximation."
>
>Have you ever met a physicist ? Seriously ?

I am one.  Some of the best workers in General Reletivity are here too.
One was my thesis advisor.

But none of that matters, because your ad-hominom's are logically invalid
and dishonest ... and unprovoked.

>why not shut up ?

Try to remain coherent.

>And yes, I feel hostile. I don't like slander and insult and misinformation.

That's the problem.  Your hostility has nothing to do with me, it was evidently
already there.  There was no slander in what I said, nor insult and certainly
no misinformation, as you've tried to demonstrate with a dishonest style
of argument.

But there is plenty from what you are writing.  If you haven't the intelligience
to argue except though personal attacks, then don't waste your time on the net.

I expected to see an intelligient evaluation from you of what was a perfectly 
rational debate.  You apparently lack the experience to remain detached enough
from what you are arguing about while still adequately expressing you sentiments
coherently.

I can understand your basic sentiments, but they are totally misguided.  You
can't just go lashing out at people just because they maintain what you 
believe is pseudo-science, simply because you are really in no position to
determine that. The truth will make itself known through the requirement that
we be consistent with it.  There is simply no better way to know it since we
do not have God's view of the world.  Saying that you do is basically
blasphemous: it amounts to saying that you are God and that other people
who may have differrent means of accessing knowledge are inferior.  This is
where the racism creeps in, because other cultrues have typically used 
other means to access knowledge.

Yes, there is a problem somewhere there.  A nebulous one that has surfaced
in the panicked postings concerning Sci. Am.  It's the idea that Science is
going to the dogs.

Well, that is not the real problem.  It is symptomatic of something else ...
something much more serious: a total communication breakdown between the
different specialists of the different fields of science.

Not an information explposion, mind you.  That's just the way it would seem
when you have an increasingly fragmented science.

What I am trying to get across here is that much of the lashing out by
the scientists against the so-called pseudo-scientists is symptomatic of this
very condition.  Some of it has also been racially motivated and some by the
arrogance of European ethnocentrism.  The example I gave concerning history
is such an example.

One can tell that it is not the problem with the education of our people.
Rather, the problem is simply that many scientists have lost much of their
credibility in the eyes of the public, partly because of them having been
burned so often while lashing out at people wrongly believed to be 
pseudo-scientists.

... and yes I do read Scientific American occasionally ... but think it
    is a little too superficial to really be an adequate forum for 
    scientific discussion.  Then again, my standards are very high.