An ominous conversation
"Here's a website discussion reported by James Robert Brown in Who Rules in Science? (2001, p. 83):
A. A pen always falls when you drop it on Earth, but it would just float away if you let go of it on the Moon.
B. What? A pen would fall if you dropped it on the Moon, just more slowly.
A. No it wouldn't, because you're too far away from Earth's gravity.
B. You saw the APOLLO astronauts walking around on the Moon, didn't you? Why didn't they float away?
A. Because they were wearing heavy boots."
-- In John Grant's Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and the War Against Reality (Prometheus Books, 2011; ISBN 978-1-61614-399-2), p. 17
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
-- First paragraph of H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu"
Something very bad has happened to the ability of many Americans to reason critically, especially when it comes to the sciences. We are so screwed.
A. A pen always falls when you drop it on Earth, but it would just float away if you let go of it on the Moon.
B. What? A pen would fall if you dropped it on the Moon, just more slowly.
A. No it wouldn't, because you're too far away from Earth's gravity.
B. You saw the APOLLO astronauts walking around on the Moon, didn't you? Why didn't they float away?
A. Because they were wearing heavy boots."
-- In John Grant's Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and the War Against Reality (Prometheus Books, 2011; ISBN 978-1-61614-399-2), p. 17
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
-- First paragraph of H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu"
Something very bad has happened to the ability of many Americans to reason critically, especially when it comes to the sciences. We are so screwed.