David Brewster Quotes
And why does England thus persecute the votaries of her science? Why does she depress them to the level of her hewers of wood and her drawers of water? Is it because science flatters no courtier, mingles in no political strife? ... Can we behold unmoved the science of England, the vital principle of her arts, struggling for existence, the meek and unarmed victim of political strife?
David Brewster, 1781-1868, Scottish Physician, Review of Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, Quarterly Review, 1830
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This quotation illustrates the extreme naivety of some of the Muslim leaders. He and many Muslims actually believe that America and the West are out to assassinate Muslim scientists to prevent Islam from advancing. This is a convenient rationale for the poor scientific level of achievement in modern Islamic cultures. Bashar and other conspiracy theorists pay little attention to the many Muslim scientists who have been and are being trained in American, French, English and other country’s universities. Muslims attend the same classes and learn from the same professors as Western students. None get assassinated. Sectarian violence of Iraq Sunni and Shiite Muslims against each other has tragically taken the lives of some scientists. Almost 1000 years ago Islam and the Arabs had many of the great scientists of the world, but the intellectual stagnation brought about by extreme Islamic fundamentalism curtailed their technical development.
Astronomy and physics were followed by chemistry and then geology and biology, and more recently we have genetics, in vitro fertilization and cloning.
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb. Oppenheimer was the great physicist who directed the successful development of the atomic bomb so as to build the weapon before Hitler did in World War II. However, as the technology evolved, he had doubts as to the wisdom of creating even more powerful hydrogen weapons. His viewpoint was hurting the administration’s policy of rapid unlimited nuclear weapons development, and he was the victim of a character assassination whereby his security clearance was withdrawn. The “father” of the atomic bomb was the first American casualty of atomic weapons development.
The governor had unseated Eugene Talmadge, an extreme anti-intellectual who refused to have anyone in his cabinet who had more than an eighth grade education:
Licensing of the press is
The lecture was a tribute to the Russian Physicist & Dissident, Andrei Sakharov
In many nations, including the United States on occasion, governments have made laws as to what is valid science and what is not. Tennessee and other Bible-Belt States have and still do on occasion. The latest being Evolution, which even in the beginning of the 21st century, Kansas determined that it was not proven science, when it is as proven as any science has ever gotten.
The Germans had just passed a law making it illegal for a Jew to work as a teacher, professor, government official, scientist, or researcher. Szilard, a Jewish Hungarian politically astute physicist who was working in Germany was trying to organize a plan for the rescue of the Jewish German scientists—to place them in scientific or teaching positions in other countries. Kuhnwald, himself a Jew, was not only a very experienced politician, but one who had been following the Nazi Germany political scene “next door” to predict the future effect on Austria.
This quotation illustrates that government use of censorship and classification to cover up errors and mistakes in not just a modern phenomenon. It is a technique that government’s will gravitate to whenever they have the chance.
Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA Scot FSSA MICE was a British scientist, inventor, author, and academic administrator. In science he is principally remembered for his experimental work in physical optics, mostly concerned with the study of the polarization of light and including the discovery of Brewster's angle. He studied the birefringence of crystals under compression and discovered photoelasticity, thereby creating the field of optical mineralogy. For this work, William Whewell dubbed him the "father of modern experimental optics" and "the Johannes Kepler of optics."
