Why? Why not?

Again, it’s been a while since my last post…

Sorry.

Currently my academic engagement is a textual concordance of books by Barry Barnes and Jerome Ravetz on the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). The aim is to show that some of the material put forward by Barnes can be used to underlay the somewhat shaky foundations of Ravetz’s work. Gotta hand in a writeup of this by the end of October.

I’m also reading Personal Knowledge: Towards a post-critical Philosophy, by Michael Polanyi. Still only a little way into it, but it sounds *very* interesting. It seems that he has similar feelings to me with respect to the experience of ‘discovery’.

I feel that the experience of discovery, or to use a more ‘religious’ word, revelation, is fundamental to our existence as human beings. The feeling that mathematicians describe about particularly beautiful mathematics, or that a programmer will describe about a beautifully crafted piece of code, is, I think, the same feeling as that felt by those who have religious experiences of the first magnitude. For those of us who, on occasion also experiment with mind-altering substances, we all know that you can experience a similar experience with their help too.

I think that until people who study science realise that the awe that one feels in these situations is just as important for what they are studying as for anything else, the study of science, and indeed science itself will be all the poorer.

Had an interesting idea today. Put in its most pithy form, it goes: Philosophy of science is to sociology of science as physics is to engineering. PhilSci is concerned with ideal situations and states of affairs, while sociology of science is most concerned with what actually goes on. Perhaps one day we’ll even get to the stage where the two fields will speak to one another enough to make some use of each other.

Yay /.! Here’s a cool site that compares scenes in the Matrix with scenes from Ghost in the Shell, two of my favourite dystopian movies. It does point out some of the scenes I noticed, like the shooting-the-pillar scene, but also some I didn’t notice too.

Well, It’s been a while, and much craziness has occurred since I last posted. The Olympics have begun, rocked, and ended, Shay bought a DVD player, and I’ve got a new job! (Well, the job is really Leveraged Work v2.0, since I’ll be working for Adelaide bank at Leveraged equities doing customer support, getting paid niiiice money.)