Thursday, August 23, 2007

The joy of questioning

Selva, who publishes TheScian.com and blogs as the Scientific Indian on scienceblogs had asked me to write a guest essay for his publication, TheScian.

My essay, titled "The joy of questioning" is now online on TheScian. What's more, Selva has taken the effort to make an audiocast out of it, with some snazzy background music to boot.

Quite flattering.

Read or hear the essay here.

3 comments:

Wavefunction said...

"All our science, measured against reality,
is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have"- Albert Einstein

"The deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them out"- Robert Oppenheimer

Good one. I would also note Kuhn's paradigm shifts, and Paul Feyerabend's contention that science is an "anarchic enterprise", something with which I don't personally agree, although it is an interesting proposition. Later writers like Freeman Dyson have also sympathized with this viewpoint of science being one among many ways of knowing, but their perspective in my opinion opens up dangerous avenues towards pseudoscience, although their points about excessive reliance on reductionist science are well-taken.
You must have read Carl Sagan's excellent "The Demon-Haunted World".

Sunil said...

Ashutosh, you are always ready with some really great quotes. Do you go about storing them in some file on your harddrive (an exercise I have often wanted to carry out, but failed to execute because of my inherent laziness!).

thanks.

Anonymous said...

Once I played silkroad, I did not know how to get strong, someone told me that you must have silkroad gold. He gave me some sro gold, he said that I could buy silkroad online gold, but I did not have money, then I played it all my spare time. From then on, I got some silk road gold, if I did not continue to play it, I can sell cheap silkroad gold to anyone who want.