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How do you feel about the discovery of the helical structure of DNA? Did Watson and Crick "steal" it from Rosslyn (sp?) Franklin? Why is Wallace not honored for his contribution to evolution? Kepler actually made the orbiting solar system make sense and apparently had something to do with calculus, but Copernicus and Newton are more honored for these things.
Can the role of egotism and pride ever be separated from the progress of science, or is the progress of science dependent on the craving for primacy and fame?
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Can the role of egotism and pride ever be separated from the progress of science, or is the progress of science dependent on the craving for primacy and fame?
Replace the word "science" with any other human endeavor, and it works as well.
Scientists are no better and no worse than human beings.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
So might makes right and cheaters prosper? Isn't science supposed to be a profession, as contrasted with the crass business world?
Posts: 2010 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Why the sexist title? Do I count as a science guy? I hope so, anyway here are my answers.
How do you feel about the discovery of the helical structure of DNA?
The discovery of DNA as a double strand, with two complementary halves, which explained how reproduction and heredity fundamentally work, was an awesome accomplishment with far-reaching effects. The helical structure isn't that crucial, really, other than allowing a lot of information to be coiled up into a compact form, I guess. But the nature of the double strand, the fact that the strand can be unzipped and made into 2 equal strands by the addition of new complementary bases, was world-shaking.
Did Watson and Crick "steal" it from Rosslyn (sp?) Franklin?
My understanding is that she is not honored as much as they, mainly because she was dead by the time they won the Nobel Prize for their work, and Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously.
Why is Wallace not honored for his contribution to evolution?
He is honored, but Darwin pre-dated him in the concept by many years. He hadn't published yet but all his buddies in the science world already knew about his theories and the book he was working on.
Kepler actually made the orbiting solar system make sense and apparently had something to do with calculus, but Copernicus and Newton are more honored for these things.
The calculus we use really was formulated by Leibnitz, not Newton. Newton had the central idea first, of adding up vanishingly small quantities, though, so he is rightly credited with inventing the idea. Copernicus explained the correct rough layout of the solar system, Kepler found the equations of motion for the planets. So both had crucial ideas. Copernicus' idea was the big zinger for non-scientists. It really changed our conception of how important we were in the vast scheme of things. This trend continues today. After finding out Earth wasn't at the center of the solar system, we went on to discover that the solar system is only a minor one among 200 billion or so in our galaxy, and it's out in the hinterlands of the spiral arms. Then we realized the galaxy itself was only one of billions of "island universes", other galaxies like our own scattered throughout space. Now we are beginning to suspect that our entire universe starting with the big bang is only one of untold numbers of big bangs that go on and have gone on in some multidimensional cosmic manifold. More on this story as it develops.
Can the role of egotism and pride ever be separated from the progress of science, or is the progress of science dependent on the craving for primacy and fame?
Though primacy and fame have their allure, the primary impetus for the progress of science is sheer curiosity and puzzlement about everything, and a driving wish to understand, along with a delight in knowledge. I see this desire as one of the many ways in which we humans manifest our divine nature, that calls us ever upward toward more intelligence, truth, and light. I think most scientists feel pretty religious about that call.
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ALthough most of them wouldn't agree with that description, ak...the religious part, that is. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Why the sexist title? Do I count as a science guy?
Anne Kate, to a lot of people, "guys" is often a gender neutral pronoun. If I were addressing a group of men and women, I might say "How are you guys doing?" or "Are you guys hungry?" and be referring to the whole group. I'm sure if varies by location and other factors, but I'll bet that's the way pooka was using it.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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Leibnitz- duh, sorry. Was Kepler even involved? I don't know anymore. I guess my point is that science is kind of a polytheistic religion of hero-gods. While they may or may not seek immortality, we do give it to them. Why is the double helix so important? Who actualy discovered DNA?
Posts: 2010 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I would challenge you that your assumption is mostly without a basis. I think science is an enterprise that (especially in the last 100 years or so) has minimized hero-worship, especially within scence itself. Sure you get the Hawkings and Einsteins, but they are popularized in largely non-science roles, or due to publishing "simplified" books for mass consumption. In the early 90s (and I think even today), most people thought of Hawkings original conception of "virtual time" (I think it's called) as fairly daft.
Heck, 90% of astrophysics related to Einstein these days is trying to find a fissure in relativity. Bringing the "hero" down a peg, as it were.
Hero worship of scientists is primarily a function of the media. Watson and Crick are important, and I certainly know their experiments, but they weren't really mentioned more than Avery, MacLeod, McCarty, Morgan, Mendel, Chargaff, Griffith, Beadle, Tatum, Hershey, Chase, McClintock, Messelson, Stahl, and others over the course of my schooling. Actually, W&C are only mentioned as an example of what you can accomplish by just pooling data without doing any lab work of your own. In other words, an off hand comment in one class. The others are a lot more important to a budding scientist.
You study these experiments because it gives you such a good grounding on first principles. So much of modern science lets you "skip steps", as it were, that you can really handicap yourself if you don't understand the principles that let these automated systems work. And, of course, you want to understand how they came to their conclusions, how they set up their experiments, and how they changed the field because doing so is so important to your own thought process and your own career.
Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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