After 1895, as it gradually became apparent across the entire width of the science and mathematics that Newtonian mechanics was perhaps not the metaphor for the way that Reality worked, individually and collectively scientists faced their biggest ever dilemma.
Up to 1895, the sort of science (Popular Science) that was taught in high schools and to undergraduates and was simplified-down whenever eminent scientists talked to the popular press, at least was the same as all scientists believed it was, whenever they wrote about it in peer-reviewed articles in the best regarded science journals.
(Best be aware that 'peer-reviewed' is a metaphor or a sort of shorthand for reliably-regarded science articles, because in fact, formal peer-review in today's sense of the term was actually quite rare until after 1945.
It was still 'peer-reviewed' before publishing but in a highly informal style - the peer might be the editor and his closest friend with some specialist knowledge in the particular area the paper dealt with.)
There was no moral divide between Published and Popular Science.
Unfortunately after 1895, this happy unity was torn apart and has never been re-sutured.
It was choice made made the scientists themselves.
They were just then (this is more than a hundred years ago, mind you) entertaining strong hopes they could do basic science full time and be both well paid (including tenure and pensions) and well respected for doing so.
Crucially, these would be jobs in other people's employ - they would be well paid well regarded employees - not self-employed entrepreneurs.
They were thus dependent highly on public good will.
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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