David writes:

> > Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science.
>
>   I think his heresy was more theological than that

In a very direct way Bruno's heresy was fundamentally theological. Bruno, by
describing the night sky as nothing more than a reflection of the world we
inhabit, stole the promise of Paradise from the believers and the Church. What
could be more threatening than that?

The Church's reaction in 1600 was no more severe than the one you would see
in the most fundamentalist parts of the Islamic world today for a similar
heresy. A high-school teacher in Iran was recently arrested as a heretic after his
students turned in him for telling them in class that Mohammed's parents were
not Muslims, but then again Jesus's parents weren't Christians either.



>  >  In their attempt to undermine the credible basis for public action (by
>  positing that all opinions are politically
>  > driven and therefore any one is as true as any other), they also
undermine
>  belief in the integrity of the scientific
>  >  process.
>
>  An extreme left-wing position. PoMo neocons? Really?
>
>  It's very emotional, isn't it? Shrill, even. Probably too much arsenic in
>  his groundwater.

No, it's not shrill at all. I perfectly well realize that most of the people
on this list have never had any contact with the scientific community. Rather
you've lived all of your lives in an environment dominated by hyperbolic
claims, PR flack and self-serving advertisements.

But this is not the sole model by which to conduct business in a social
context. No one quite ever gets around to telling you rules in science, but you
quickly pick them up during your six, eight or ten years of postgraduate
training. The most basic rules are that you are allowed to distort, misrepresent or
present half-truths exactly one time. After that, you will ostracized from the
community, you will recieve no more grant monies, you will be asked to resign
your position and you will most likely never publish a paper in a well-reviewed
journal again.

To imagine the stark difference, now take those rules and apply them to your
average CEO, public relations official, consulting agency or advertising
writer. You've simply become innured to being lied to (and being told half-truths
and having the "best face being put on a situation" is a very definitely a form
of lying) and you now accept it as the norm. Perception is not reality;
indeed often the two are quite different things.

A great portion of the reason that I have been extremely proud of my nearly
30-year association with Hewlett-Packard -- until the last few years, that is
-- is that the HP of Bill & Dave worked within the rules that I was well
familiar with. Their advertisements were technical, prosaic and without hyperbole.
Even more importantly, they understated the values of the products they were
producing; you always received more value from the product than you were
expecting or were promised.

Integrity is a word bandied around a lot nowadays, but it is possible to live
integriful lives -- and the scientific process is constructed so that it
imbues that ethic into every attribute of its procedures. The most basic attribute
of the process is that no one's word is above reproach and every claim, if it
is in any way doubtful, is checked and double-checked not only for the
accuracy of the initial data but also for the appropriateness of the interpretation.

Wirt Atmar

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