Tag: Not Even Wrong

Recommended by Ricochet Members Created with Sketch. Quote of the Day: Toynbee on the Passion for Wealth

Arahant
By Arahant
Arahant Member
Corporate governance, process management and change management consultant, poet, alchemist, and writer.
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“We must expect for a long time yet to see capitalists still striving to obtain the highest possible profits. But observe, that the passion for wealth is certainly in some senses new. It grew up very rapidly at the beginning of the present century; it was not so strong in the last century, when men were much more content to lead a quiet easy life of leisure. The change has really influenced the relations between men; but in the future it is quite possible that the scramble for wealth may grow less intense, and a change in the opposite direction take place.” — Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883), Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884)

Toynbee is described as an Economic Historian. He was an Oxford graduate. And no, he is not his nephew, Arnold Joseph Toynbee, who was a historian. The century he is speaking of was his own, the Nineteenth Century.

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. Saturday Night Science: Not Even Wrong

John Walker
By John Walker
John Walker Contributor
John Walker is a member of Ricochet.
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Richard FeynmanNot Even Wrong by Peter Woit, a man about as difficult to bamboozle on scientific topics as any who ever lived, remarked in an interview (p. 180) in 1987, a year before his death:

…I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and it is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say “Well, it still might be true.”

Feynman was careful to hedge his remark as being that of an elder statesman of science, who collectively have a history of foolishly considering the speculations of younger researchers to be nonsense, and he would have almost certainly have opposed any effort to cut off funding for superstring research, as it might be right, after all, and should be pursued in parallel with other promising avenues until they make predictions which can be tested by experiment, falsifying and leading to the exclusion of those candidate theories whose predictions are incorrect.

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