Hi koan; Re: "Pretty soon the science and weather events of global warming will be clear to everyone and not in dispute, like with cancer and cigarettes.";
Compare and contrast, LOL:
"Jesus is returning soon. Events of the 20th Century totally fulfill prophecies found in Revelation Chapter 6. We, our parents, and our grandparents are all witness to the foretold events leading up to His Return. ";
jesusisreturningsoon.com
-- Carl
P.S. My recollection is that you're a fan of Aristotle. A 1997 book on Newton by Michael White concentrates on his alchemical influences and work and as I read it, I noticed some nice parallels between Aristotle's bad science and the modern global warming religion.
It's getting a lot of good reviews in the physics world. My recollection is that I saw it mentioned in Physics Today, probably in reference to another book on Newton I ordered at the same time, "Newton and the Origin of Civilization", which is about Newton's work on the age of the world (which he derived from careful reading of the Bible). Or maybe I saw it in a review while ordering the "origin" book on Amazon. Anyway it arrived in the mail a few months ago and I started reading it a few days ago.
Some book reviews for the alchemistry book:
nightskyobserver.com
simonsingh.net
And a PBS / Nova link on Newton's alchemy:
pbs.org
So here's what the book says about Aristotle:
Isaac Newton; The Last Sorcerer
Michael White, (1997), hardback, pp 30-33 Addison Wesley
The Greek philosophy that prevailed upto Newton's time was that traditionally attributed to Aristotle - the notion of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. The alternative was the ideas of Democritus, born some seventy-five years before Aristotle, in 460BC, who taught that matter is made up of tiny invisible parts, or atoms. Because Aristotle and Plato both largely disapproved of Democritus's atomic theory, however, it was almost completely ignored from Aristotle's day until its partial revival during the seventeenth century.
...
Plato, Aristotle's teacher (and the man who established the school at the Academy in Athens which lasted nine centuries), actively disliked experiment and so it was never established as a guiding principle for Greek natural philosophy. Instead, Aristotle and the generations of Greek thinkers who followed him created a rigid set of rules based upon syllogistic logic only, producing a distorted picture of reality. But, because of Aristotle's stature, this limited approach became endowed with an aura of infallibility which persisted until the beginning of the modern era. The historian Charles Singer has said of this unfortunate process: "The whole theory of science was interpreted, and the whole of logic was so constructed, as to lead upto the ideal of demonstrative science [i.e. conclusions reached through reasoning alone], which in its turn rested on a false analogy which assimilated it to the dialectics of proof. Does not this mistake go far to account for the neglect of experience and the unprogressiveness of science for nearly 2,000 years after Aristotle?[1]
In the same vein, the writer and historian Sir William Dampier pointed out that: "Aristotle, while dealing skilfully with the theory of the passage from particular instances to general propositions, in practice often failedlamentably. Taking the available facts, he would rush atonce tothe wildest generalisations. Naturally he failed. Enough facts were not available, and there was no adequate scientific background into which they could be fitted.[2]
...
Aristotle's dogma became almost a religion among his followers, and his teachings were passed on to future generations virtually unquestioned, misguiding future thinkers and leading science along a partially blind alley for several hundred years without interruption.
amazon.com
By the way, the problem of educating students away from Aristotle's view of the world continues today. It's part of the pedagogy of physics. For example:
Common Sense Concepts about Motion
Halloun and Hestenes, Am. J. Phys. 53, November 1985
... Aristotelian misconceptions about freefall are common among students and difficult to rectify.
phys205.physics.tamu.edu
Now this is not to say that modern students read Aristotle. No, the commonality between students and Aristotle is that neither of them are deep thinkers and are inclined to look at things very superficially. Same problem with global warming alarmists. |
