Comments for Curiosity Roving at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 11 out of 11 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Wed, 22 May 2013 20:12:30 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12852 I was one of those who woke up and stayed up late Sunday night and early Monday morning. I don't think I met anyone that day who didn't think that I was a bit odd for doing so. But as I responded, in 1962 at James Monroe Elementary school as we watched Redstones launch on TV (rockets built here by Chrysler under the supervision of Magnus von Braun, Werner's brother) I believed in the space program and I still do. Paradoxically as science has become more politicized the romance has gone out of it. The romance of the unsentimental but hopeful engineer that Mr. Warren so brilliantly describes. Between David Warner and PM Stephen Harper I'm beginning to have some hope for my neighbor just across the Detroit River. The best essay I've read on the significance of Curiousity. - Graham Combs Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:16:30 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12838 Mr. Warren, Welcome! We are going to have a lot of fun together. As an engineer, I truly enjoyed this article on many levels. Firstly, I could not agree more on the beauty of guileless communication. There IS a certain poetry in simple, factual speech, even if many would consider “engineer speak” unnecessarily jargon-littered. It seems to me that much of the jargon is necessary and promotes an economy of thought that typifies the scientific mind. As for the actual mars landing, aside from all the emotion and the crowd's thrill, it was freaking COOL! It WAS a crazy plan. But many of the best plans in history were a little crazy. That’s what makes scientific exploration and innovation in general exciting. Sometimes, to do something that’s never been done before, you have to take chances. I have no idea who came up with the original idea, but I imagine a harried, disheveled lower level guy thinking about the problem while pounding out his TPS reports and answering his mountain of daily e-mails. Later, I can see him; kicked back in his cheap chair, with his feet up in his crappy little cubicle munching on a granola bar during lunch when it all came together for him. The eureka moment! Then he probably suffered through a phalanx of bureaucrats telling him that it wouldn’t work, but he stayed after it and the right senior level engineer actually looked at it and wondered: “Is this for real?” But the bug settled in and just wouldn’t die as all the other goofy ideas came and went. This too is engineering. Sometimes, it’s not the perfect idea that gets tried, just the least imperfect, or the one with the most dogged champion. Read up on Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. That crazy idea came to be almost exactly like my dramatization of this one. It’s fun stuff. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of people in modern society that can appreciate it. We are become a nation of end-users. We live in the most technologically advanced times on record, yet as a populous, have the least amount of knowledge about how things work since maybe caveman times. As technology advances, its operation is increasingly dumbed -down so more and more people can use it without having the burden of actually understanding it. Ostensibly, we were all taught scientific method in primary school, but since the education system is woeful, few people graduate high school with even a basic understanding or any desire to pursue further education in the sciences. In these circumstances, scientism will flourish. As less and less of the congregants of this new religion are equipped to think critically, or have any real scientific knowledge, it becomes easier for the Pharisees to say: “you stay on this side of the veil and we’ll tell you what to think.” Eventually, the dissenting scientists will be cast out as apostates and smeared as blasphemers. Goofy, unsubstantiated, or intentionally misleading theories will rule the day when marked with the imprimatur: “Leading Scientists say…”. I think we are in for more dark days ahead. Thank God for,…well, for Himself. Because He is the only power on Earth that can defeat the amassed ignorance of we humble men and the evil powers that want to harness it. - Layman Tom Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:21:37 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12828 In the last century, there was still enough of the American recognition of God as the divine author of creation (recall the Declaration of Independence's reference to "Nature's God", Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, even Woodrow Wilson's deference to the Bible as the word of God, etc.), that scientism had little chance of becoming a popular ideology. Now the U.S. has undergone a series of political and legal changes that have brought it to the very edge of corporate statism. The state recognizes only itself as author of the common good and has thereby made it illegal to run Catholic hospitals or adoption services. The U.S. teeters on a spiritual precipice. - G.K. Thursday Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:53:02 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12819 I love it! Even Zeus cloud-gatherer obeys the Lord and not the bratty scientists who worship at his grandmother's altar. What a strange and frightening time it is when clever inventions are enough a reason to hand over all the power and potential we do have to such callous and immature men. Hopefully the first human on Mars has a revelation there that convinces everyone to return to Christ or else it won't matter if it had been Jupiter instead and a man had gone there. - Jacob R Thu, 09 Aug 2012 05:12:58 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12818 Good heavens, Mr. Warren, no wonder you lost your job at the Ottawa Citizen! Your editorials always struck me as a bit more insightful, a bit more learned, than one is accustomed to in modern Western media. Clearly, you were holding back: you are way over-qualified for mere journalism. I look forward to many more articles from you, if this be a sample. - Richard A Thu, 09 Aug 2012 05:09:28 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12817 David, well phrased. I've always been fascinated with astronomy. Your column reminded me of this exchange between Tess and her little brother Abraham in Thomas Hardy's (my favorite novelist) Tess of the D’urbervilles: Little brother Abraham: Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted." "Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?" "A blighted one." - Grump Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:03:53 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12816 Atheist philosopher Paul Feyerabend wrote elegantly on the reductionist, 'path-of-least-resistance' habits of scientists. For Feyerabend, there is no scientific method, only a collection of methods that vary widely by discipline. He wrecks modern scientific cant, which is why scientists ignore him. Ten minutes with Feyerabend will do the soul good. - Dennis Larkin Thu, 09 Aug 2012 03:31:15 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12814 Anyone with design experience has an appreciation for a brilliantly tuned system that reflects back the skill, the knowledge and the imagination (to envision that which does not yet exist and "see" it in relationship with its environment) and that functions as intended. Our ability to design is one of the ways we are made in the image of our Creator. Only a fool could contemplate the physical world and place his faith in the efficacy of Blind Chance and his stooge Time. Unfortunately, there are plenty of fools. - Othe Joe Thu, 09 Aug 2012 01:45:27 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12813 Wittgenstein, in a characteristic flash of humour, divided his Cambridge colleagues into those who knew more and more about less and less, until they knew everything about nothing and those who knew less and less about more and more, until the knew nothing about everything - Michael Paterson-Seymour Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:49:16 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12812 I agree one would think the "mob" in NY would scream USA USA" but i feel we have lost so much of our patriatism, imagine "our" parents screaming "Science"? I would think after a decade of work by Americans we would "HONOR" there work with a chant of "USA,USA!",The reality i feel is Americans were screaming it to there televisions, Thank God! - Jack,CT Wed, 08 Aug 2012 21:09:28 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/curiosity-roving.html#comment-12811 Engineering is fine but I don't get why James Lovelock argument about the presence of life on other planets is not widely accepted. Lovelock argued that to last over geological timescales, life must cover a planet entirely and thickly. Otherwise the life is not going to be stable against the external shocks and internal instabilities. The thick coverage of a planet would then be observable through analysis of the planetary spectra. Planets without life show an atmosphere in chemical equilibrium while Earth's atmosphere has non-trivial amounts of both oxygen and methane existing together thus showing evidence of non-equilibrium processes. Life could be a source of non-equilibrium but an equilibrium could never harbor life. Thus there is no need to spend billions of dollars to know what can be inferred from spectral analysis on earth itself. - Gian Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:11:53 +0100