The OED defines Godwin’s Law: A facetious aphorism maintaining that as an online debate increases in length, it becomes inevitable that someone will eventually compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. See the Wikipedia entry on Godwin’s Law for interesting variations, details, and links to further discussion. For a smart adaptation of […]
In his response, Dr. Rundvist restates his original claim and enlists me in the project: history of science ([deleted because I over stated the case]) must show how past scientific debates have been resolved the in present, thereby contributing to an overall increase in human knowledge. Dr. Rundkvist characterizes knowledge in a way that I […]
The following is essentially a guest post by Martin Rundkvist. He is responding to my comments a few days ago about “Scientific Progress and the History of Science,” which was a response to his “Historians of Science Need to Know Current Science.” Dr. Rundkvist was polite and invited me to respond to his comments. Although […]
In “Historians of Science Need to Know Current Science” Martin Rundkvist rants about those annoying “knowledge relativist historian[s] of science.” Those degenerates are ignorant and lazy, and mock the hard intellectual work and real accomplishments of science. They are also hypocritical. They don’t really believe all that relativist claptrap. Rundkvist wants, instead, a history of […]
Social Newtonianism seems to be on the rise. Recently Newton’s three laws of motion were used to describe traffic in Manila and before that Newton’s third law of motion was used to assess risk in banking investments, which I wrote about here. Now we see an executive coach applying Newton’s “three laws of motion to […]
In an article in the ABA Banking Journal, Patrick Ward invokes Newton’s third law of motion to help ALCOs think about risk in their investments: Sir Isaac Newton, Laws of Motion, and Banking Capital. According to Ward: Conceptually, Sir Isaac’s third law applies to the current Federal Reserve policies, interest rates, and banks’ investment portfolios–specifically, […]
In a conversation with Ann Finkbeiner Dan Vergano offers some interesting and provocative thoughts on the science ghetto. One of his points seems to be that science journalism has not made a case for its relevance to broader news stories. Unfortunately, he suggests, by concentrating on “gee-whiz stuff” science writers have contributed the marginalization of […]