I recently learned that a five year old really wanted a particular toy but was told that her parents had spent enough and wouldn’t buy it. She pulled out all the rhetorical stops and went into her rousing mode. She said,” Mom and Dad, we can do this! Mom, if you provide $5 and Dad, if you provide $6, we would have enough money for that toy.” The parents were not persuaded but were still chuckling at the persuasive machinery that had been rolled out and, as we say, deployed.
The other day, an exchange took place between two mature, educated adults as to the nature of science. Since we are aware of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos” program and both supporters and detractors of its contents, we can see that science is a rational, steady attempt to support ideas with evidence that is convincing while it is also a lightening rod for controversy and disagreement, just as it was back in the days of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. We know today that any idea or statement or notion or philosophy might be a good thing, a step forward for humankind to adopt but it can still be hard to entertain some of the cockeyed notions that come along.
Besides, we have mass media, spin doctors, marketing experts and I imagine, reputation manglers who are at least as good as their work as any predecessors were. We have experienced being sold on new ideas and products that not long ago, we never heard of so we know that minds can be changed, challenged and frightened. One side of the exchange stood for science as a calm, reasoned procedure while the other side pointed to the mistakes of science such as the ether, and the controversies and the difficulties, arguing that science, like other fields, has its ups and downs and is not a straight line to the truth.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
