Luis Walter Alvarez Quotes
I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors.
Browne, Malcolm W. "The Debate Over Dinosaur Extinctions Takes an Unusually Rancorous Turn." The New York Times, 19 Jan. 1988, p. C1.
“Gavage” means to force fed huge amounts of food to the animals—more than they would eat normally. If we force-fed humans regular table salt, death would result even though we do not consider salt a dangerous substance.
This is a very material quotation with regard to Congress creating science-related policies and legislation. The members of Congress know the least about scientific matters than almost anything else that they have to legislate about. So typically they rely on scientific experts. Scientists are witnesses at Congressional hearings and often the political, polarized staff arrange to have scientists who disagree in something. They both have PhDs in the field, but one may be a great scientists and the other, a lightweight. This is where Alverez’s point becomes so critical. The Congress and staff have to learn how to differentiate between a “second rater” or a “Fermi” one of the great physicists of all time.
Scientists themselves contain religious believers as well as atheists and agnostics, While there are a number of scientists who argue against religion, there are many who do not and are believers. Albert Einstein, for example, was a believer in a universal God. See {631763}.
This quotation is significant for several reasons. The 3 time candidate for President not only railed against anything having to do with evolution, but in this same year, participated as a prosecutor in the infamous Scopes Trial in Tennessee where a school teacher was convicted of a crime for discussing the idea of evolution in a high school classroom. In this case, he attacked anthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn who had hypothesized that a fossilized tooth he had found might have come from a humanoid predecessor of Homo Sapiens. Bryan of course ignored the even then overwhelming evidence of evolution as a mechanism. He was actually right in criticizing Osborn in this case although Bryan had no real evidence for it. Two years later, Osborn published a retraction and correction indicating that better tools and methods of analysis indicated that the tooth was from a primitive species of pig and not of a pre human.
Luis Walter Alvarez was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for development of the hydrogen bubble chamber enabling discovery of resonance states in particle physics. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century."
