Girl Geek: this is an exactly accurate pic of me.
Having been doing my job for a few years I have come to realise that that category they put you in at school (you know, are you good at english or maths) is total, utter bollocks. Anyone with a bit of intelligence and a bit of application can understand anything at all. And so I started to get interested in the True Facts About Things. And I started to Look Stuff Up Properly. Properly, a word which here means so that the conclusion of the search would be capable of being proved in court with evidence. It turns out that the Proper Answer is a hell of a lot more interesting than the woo version, too.
I’m also addicted to reading novels and English Lit in general, so this site will also include some lit crit. If I can remember how to do it.
In The Two Cultures lecture, CP Snow said:
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”
This was said in 1959. I think the problem is, if anything, worse today.
This blog is my (v small) contribution to the fight against the endarkenment. And an opportunity to persuade you to read some Really Good Books.
Great stuff you have in here!I will visit this site once again.
Interesting. More critcal thinkers should talk about the distances between the knowledge of ordinary people and working scientists. There’s a whole range of needs and abilities, etc. there, and a whole range of definitions of who is what (for one perspectuve see “The Age of American Unreason” – Susan Jacoby). That everyone can profit from more education, whether it is any form of the sciences or arts, is of course a given. Good luck with your commenting.