The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

It didn’t rise to 40 years until around the year 1870. It reached 50 in 1915, 60 in 1930, 70 in 1955, and is today approaching 80 (a little more for women, a little less for men)

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds written by Charles Mackay

I reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative and communicative

The same is true of what seems to be a portrait of the cartoon character Bugs Bunny on the Uranian moon Ariel.

If we examine available surface images of Venus, occasionally a peculiar landform swims into view - as, for example, a rough portrait of Joseph Stalin discovered by American geologists analysing Soviet orbital radar imagery

Each field of science has its own complement of pseudo-science. Geophysicists have flat Earths, hollow Earths, Earths with wildly bobbing axes to contend with, rapidly rising and sinking continents, plus earthquake prophets. Botanists have plants whose passionate emotional lives can be monitored with He detectors, anthropologists have surviving ape-men, zoologists have extant dinosaurs, and evolutionary biologists have Biblical literalists snapping at their flanks. Archaeologists have ancient astronauts, forged runes and spurious statuary. Physicists have perpetual motion machines, an army of amateur relativity disprovers, and perhaps cold fusion. Chemists still have alchemy. Psychologists have much of psychoanalysis and almost all of parapsychology. Economists have long-range economic forecasting. Meteorologists, so far, have long-range weather forecasting, as in the sunspot-oriented Farmer’s Almanac (although long-term climate forecasting is another matter). Astronomy has, as its most prominent pseudoscience, astrology But because I work mainly with planets, and because I’ve been interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the pseudo-sciences that most often park themselves on my doorstep involve other worlds and what we have come so easily in our time to - the discipline out of which it emerged.

except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up – the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains – were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.]

Roughly half the scientists on Earth work at least part-time for the military

The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson.*

[* Although claims can be made for Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Britain had such a Prime Minister in Margaret Thatcher.

It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth.