Word: scientistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FIFTEEN YEARS ago a venerated, thick-jowled and white-haired English Man of Letters and Amateur Scientist named Sir Charles P. Snow delivered a famous lecture at Cambridge University. The title of the lecture was The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Sir Charles's message was that English and, in fact, all of Western society no longer possesses a "common culture." We are divided into scientists and nonscientists, and between us we no longer speak the same language. Since science dominates our lives and prospects, he pontificated, the scientific ignorance of politicians, businessmen, and everyone else except scientists themselves...
...Thoreau was a natural scientist as well as a machine-breaker and Henry Miller, though he studied (on his own) enough science to pass ten Nat Sci courses still passionately wanted to dynamite the whole industrial face of Brooklyn and let the splinters fall into the polluted Hudson River. Familiarity didn't breed anything but contempt...
...MONTHS ago an unknown American Man of Letters and Scientist named Robert Pirsig, an academic outcast, a thin and dishevelled middle class American who rides a BMW and makes a living writing technical manuals, published a first novel entitled Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book is a major signpost on the cultural road we have been glancing at, a massive imaginative inquiry into technology, the philosophical foundations of science and their bearings on American life. It uncovers and explores certain important hinges that lie rusted in the region of unexamined values and beliefs...
...asked him, "Comrade Kapitsa, why won't you work on something of military significance? We badly need you to work on our defense program." To the best of my recollection, he answered, "I'm a scientist, and scientists are like artists. They want other people to talk about their work, to make movies about it, to write articles about it in the newspapers. The trouble with military topics is that they're all secret. If a scientist does research in defense problems, he has to bury himself behind the walls of an institute and never be heard...
...mistake by refusing to work on military problems. My mistake was in refusing to let him go abroad. So, as people used to say when I was a child, we can call it quits. I now ask Academician Kapitsa, whom I've always respected as a great scientist, to forgive...