Both Barnum and H. L. Mencken are said to have made the depressing observation that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it – but only a part – she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments.
The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie.
As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.
The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps. Should I do something with this?
Einstein had been fascinated by Bernstein’s People’s Book of Natural Science, a popularization of science that described on its very first page the astonishing speed of electricity through wires and light through space. He wondered what the world would look like if you could travel on a wave of light. To travel at the speed of light? What an engaging and magical thought for a boy on the road in a countryside dappled and rippling in sunlight.
The Cardiff Giant that most Americans have seen is this copy. Barnum exhibited a fake fake.
What did she expect? It was like trying to visualize a new primary color or a world in which you could recognize several hundred acquaintances individually only by their smells... She could talk about this, but she couldn’t experience it.
For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
If scientists can be fooled on the question of the simple interpretation of straightforward data of the sort that they are routinely obtaining from other kinds of astronomical objects, when the stakes are high, when the emotional predispositions are working, what must be the situation where the evidence is much weaker, where the will to believe is much greater, where the skeptical scientific tradition has hardly made a toehold – namely, in the area of religion?
Haldane imagined a far future when the stars have darkened and space is mainly filled with a cold thin gas. Nevertheless, if we wait long enough statistical fluctuations in the density of this gas will occur. Over immense periods of time the fluctuations will be sufficient to reconstitute a Universe something like our own. If the Universe is infinitely old, there will be an infinite number of such reconstitutions, Haldane pointed out.
Such stories include Robert Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, Jack Finney’s Time and Again, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Fear of death, which in some respects is adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach an afterlife of bliss for heroes – or even for those who just did what those in authority told them – might gain a competitive advantage.
And therefore I would say that the first thing to do is to realize that governments, all governments, at least on occasion, lie. And some of them do it all the time – some of them do it only every second statement – but, by and large, governments distort the facts in order to remain in office.
We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Clause.
Pre-scientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. Field interrogation of informants from a different culture is not always easy.
The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system.
Scientific insight made him feel something, a soaring sensation, a recognition that he could only compare to falling in love. And as he used to say: “When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.
Early in my studies, I was amazed and disappointed that such a view had ever been taken seriously, that for planets of other stars, absence of evidence had been considered evidence of absence.
A little deeper was a fear of falling in love without reservation, of committing herself to someone who might then be snatched from her. Or simply leave her. But if you never really fall in love, you can never really miss it.