I was asked is there anything that Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that I find to be silly? Yes; “You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won’t. Especially not astrophysicists—we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth. I say this because Robert Jastrow, an astrophysicist, pushed for SDI hard and was a huge hawk for the Reagan Administration. He did this contra what all of the enviornmentalists were saying. He (along with is physics colleagues Bill Nirenberg and Fred Seitz) very easily could have caused a nuclear holocaust with his support of SDI and the belief that nuclear war was winnable. To me, this is far worse than leading one army into battle. The idea that scientists are rational agents who dont support silly shit out of their line of expertise is historically unfounded and (this is the historian in me speaking) I could not say that quote with a straight face. This is why consensus and the institutional filters of science are so important.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 16:47:58 +0000
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