>From: "Steve Fuller" <s.w.fuller@...>
>
>I believe that Norman Levitt has provided just the right context for
>thinking about the Columbia disaster. And I also share his suspicions
>and prognoses surrounding the event. Yet, what he says raises some
>rather large questions that may be worth taking up in Scipolicy –
>formally or otherwise. Here are two that cut somewhat against each
>other:
>
>(1) Is it hypocritical for the scientific community to complain
>about public ignorance of science, when at least some sectors of that
>community – e.g. NASA? – routinely capitalize on this ignorance to
>promote their own interests? Levitt’s remarks suggest that if
>politicians knew more science, they would not be so overawed by manned
>space missions. I agree. But wouldn’t the next best thing be for
>scientists to expose each other’s snake oil more publicly – instead of
>concentrating their fire on UFOists, Creationists, etc.?

NASA is a part of the scientific community in much the same sense that Nero
was part of the community of lyric poets. NASA is a bureaucracy with lots
of money to hand out to lots of people for lots of reasons. Some of the
recipients are scientists and, depending on the exact nature of the
relationship, some of those who are privately critical of NASA will maintain
a discreet silence. To the extent that the scientific community has an
authentic and recognizale voice, it has been very critical of NASA for the
obvious reason: it spends enormous amounts of money on projects of small
scientific (or practical) value and thereby chokes off money that might go
into more valuable research. By the way, NSF has gone downhill over the
last 30 years for rather different reasons--but that's another story.

If scientist's criticism of NASA and its ilk doesn't get into the headlines,
blame the people who write and publish headlines. From the point of view of
most working scientists, NASA and its schemes have been a blight, and people
have said so continually for three decades.

As to "snake oil" outright there is some--rather little, but some--and it
does get exposed with some vehemence. To take an example with which I have
something to do, consider the pieces of Bricmont and Goldstein in "The
Flight from Science and Reason." Bricmont demolished Prigogine's rather
loopy notions concerning classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics
(Prigogine's the one with the Noel Prize, of course); Goldstein had some
rather nasty ut accurate things to say about, inter alis, Bohr and
Heisenberg qua metaphysicians (and mathematicians). But in any case, this
sort of thing goes on all the time in all fields--but don't expect it to
compete with "The Fear Factor" for audience popularity.

As to UFO's, Creationism and so forth: those are on a different order than
the problem of an occasional colleague being unacceptably sloppy or
dishonest outright. They are, in fact, massive epidemics of psychopathology
and cultural cancers that are vastly damaging.

>
>(2) At the same time, the symbolism historically surrounding the
>manned space program had to do with not only exploring ‘the final
>frontier’ but also beating the Russians on some surrogate Cold War
>battleground. This part of the story may not have been so irrational, if
>it deflected interest (and resources) from actual engagement in military
>conflict. Is there some scientifically respectable way of pursuing this
>political angle?
>

The "space race," as an important aspect of Cold War political and
propaganda struggle, was essentially over by 1969. The US won. This fact,
indeed, is what drove NASA into a panic in the early '70's and the shuttle
program was the result. You'll note that the "Russians"--Lenin's heirs, that
is--have been gone for more than a decade, but NASA keeps singing the same
tune with slightly revised lyrics. Whether the space race functioned, in
its heyday as a Jamesian (W.) "moral equivalent of war" and thus held down
the possibility of real military confrontation is debateable. Personally, I
doubt it. The best you can say is that it probably siphoned off a little of
the money that might have gone into military hardware--but not all that
much.

>Yours in discourse,
>
>Steve
>

Yours in disgrace,

N. Levitt

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