{"id":3068,"date":"2008-05-07T08:18:44","date_gmt":"2008-05-07T15:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=3068"},"modified":"2008-05-07T08:18:46","modified_gmt":"2008-05-07T15:18:46","slug":"a-celebration-of-western-civilization-and-the-scientific-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/3068\/a-celebration-of-western-civilization-and-the-scientific-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"A celebration of Western Civilization and the Scientific Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is quoted from a John Derbyshire dismissal of a creationist documentary film<\/a>. That much is good. This much is great:<\/p>\n

Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.<\/p>\n

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.<\/p>\n

If I write with more feeling than usual here it is because I have just shipped off a review to an editor (for another magazine) of Gino Segrè’s new book about the history of quantum mechanics. It’s a good, if not very remarkable, book giving pen-portraits of the great players in physics during the 1920s and 1930s, and of their meetings and disagreements. Segrè, a particle physicist himself, who has been around for a while, knew some of these people personally, and of course heard many anecdotes from their intellectual descendants. It’s a “warm” book, full of feeling for the scientists and their magnificent enterprise, struggling with some of the most difficult problems the human intellect has ever confronted, striving with all their powers to understand what can barely be understood.<\/p>\n

Gino Segrè’s book — and, of course, hundreds like it (I have, ahem, Read more<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is quoted from a John Derbyshire dismissal of a creationist documentary film. That much is good. This much is great: Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,29,19],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-egoism-in-action","7":"category-group-therapy","8":"category-technology","10":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":16964,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/16964\/unchained-melody-falling-down\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":0},"title":"Unchained Melody: \u201cFalling\u00a0Down\u201d","author":"Greg Swann","date":"September 10, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"You might think Leonard Cohen is my secret vice, but it's actually Tom Waits. I don't like it that I like this song. It's not about 9\/11 \u2013 nor the decay of Western Civilization. Not at all.","rel":"","context":"In "Casual Friday"","block_context":{"text":"Casual Friday","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/casual-friday\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/y9YQsfh03No\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10111,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/10111\/we-are-easy-prey-propositions-three-and-seven-by-richard-mitchell\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":1},"title":"\u201cWe are easy prey\u201d \u2013 Propositions Three and Seven by Richard Mitchell","author":"Greg Swann","date":"September 8, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Propositions Three and Seven from The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell \u00a0In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king. And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king. And why not? 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Greece is broke. So is England, and so is most of the rest of Europe. California is broke, Illinois is broke, and, if you count unfunded pension liabilities, not only are all the rest of the states, counties and cities broke, so are\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Mother"","block_context":{"text":"Big Mother","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/big-mother\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17298,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/17298\/overnight-news-has-joe-biden-frolicked-things-up-just-in-time\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":3},"title":"Overnight News: Has Joe\u00a0Biden frolicked things up just in time?","author":"Greg Swann","date":"October 12, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Speaking of Joe Biden, Barack Obama said, \u201cDon't underestimate Joe's ability to [frolic] things up.\u201d Saturday, I said: \u201cI desperately wanted for this election to be about Marxism: \u2018You\u2019re what\u2019s for dinner!\u2122\u2019 Biden wanted for this election to be about Trump. 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