Why we do science rather than mysticism...
So Satya, a writer for the Examiner1 objects to crashing a lunar orbiter into the Moon, on the basis of metaphor confused with reality. Making fun of her lunacy (I stole that one from one of the commenters) feels like beating up a 5 year old might, so I'll just point out one particularly unenlightened paragraph:
Purposefully crashing something into the moon just to watch what happens is akin to a schoolboy cutting up a live frog to see what makes it jump. It is an example of the domination of the left-brained rational scientific approach over the intuitive.
No doubt Satya has no idea that cutting up a frog (not live) was what lead Luigi Galvani to discover bioelectricity. Ironically it may have been Luigi's intuitive, unscientific acceptance of vitalism which prevented him from realising (or accepting) the truth about what he'd discovered, instead leading him to propose that the eletricity he'd observed was instrinsic to the animal, produced by the muscles. This was wrong, demonstrated as such by Alessandro Volta who produced electricity outside the body with a few simple materials, resulting in the invention of the world's first battery. An invention without which Satya would be unable to share her ignorance with everyone via the Internet. Perhaps that would have been a good thing after all.
(and yes, the analogy fails, as does any relevance to what might have passed for an argument if it were any more than misguided rhetoric. I'll leave it as a basic exercise for the reader to show how the analogy fails.)
1. Not a prestigious position. The quality of many of their articles is similar to the one linked to.
Purposefully crashing something into the moon just to watch what happens is akin to a schoolboy cutting up a live frog to see what makes it jump. It is an example of the domination of the left-brained rational scientific approach over the intuitive.
No doubt Satya has no idea that cutting up a frog (not live) was what lead Luigi Galvani to discover bioelectricity. Ironically it may have been Luigi's intuitive, unscientific acceptance of vitalism which prevented him from realising (or accepting) the truth about what he'd discovered, instead leading him to propose that the eletricity he'd observed was instrinsic to the animal, produced by the muscles. This was wrong, demonstrated as such by Alessandro Volta who produced electricity outside the body with a few simple materials, resulting in the invention of the world's first battery. An invention without which Satya would be unable to share her ignorance with everyone via the Internet. Perhaps that would have been a good thing after all.
(and yes, the analogy fails, as does any relevance to what might have passed for an argument if it were any more than misguided rhetoric. I'll leave it as a basic exercise for the reader to show how the analogy fails.)
1. Not a prestigious position. The quality of many of their articles is similar to the one linked to.