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December 20, 2008
Cryptic Questions (Are we at the brink yet? Which brink?)
Thus far, only a minority of economists seem to think the economic crisis now claiming center stage may be a repeat of the Great Depression. On the other hand, the breathtaking scope of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and its cast of dupes tells a story of its own: it takes the bursting of a really big bubble to expose such a lucrative scam.Speaking of scams, the one I’ve been preoccupied with for years is America’s drug war, which has co-opted its own cast of suckers through the usual cognitive mechanisms: insecurity and greed leavened with a dollop of truth, all of which are convincingly armored by a hard shell of fear.
Admittedly, that metaphor could be readily adapted to most human follies, those we already know about and those we have yet to discover. All of which leads me in roundabout fashion, to the question du jour: how is new scientific truth usually discovered? The answer is that it’s often by exposure of false assumptions, many of which seemed quite reasonable and were often protected by dogma. Galileo remains the classic example, but there have been many others. Also the first skeptic to question accepted dogma was more often ignored or punished than praised and rewarded.
The usual starting point for most such new “truths” was the questioning of a false assumption, which raises a further question about Galileo, Newton, and Einstein: did they fail to ask an even more basic question, namely: is belief in God/gods necessary for “ultimate” human understanding of the cosmos?
Or, perhaps more basic: shouldn't we stop putting the cart before the horse before it's too late?
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at December 20, 2008 06:08 PM