Edward Bullard Quotes
I suspect that the most important effect of World War II on physical science lay in the change in the attitude of people to science. The politicians and the public were convinced that science was useful and were in no position to argue about the details. A professor of physics might be more sinister than he was in the 1930s, but he was no longer an old fool with a beard in a comic-strip. The scientists or at any rate the physicists, had changed their attitude. They not only believed in the interest of science for themselves, they had acquired also a belief that the tax-payer should and would pay for it and would, in some unspecified length of run, benefit by it.
Edward Bullard, English Physicist, “The Effect of World War II on the Development of Knowledge in the Physical Sciences,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1975
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Chaplin was talking to Albert Einstein when the two of them were the two most famous and well liked men in the world.
Compared this to public figures a century later where a major object was to “intrude” views upon the public as much as possible. Washington was not unusual for the time. Shortly thereafter Theodore Roosevelt would change the face of politics by reaching the public skillfully and often. Others continued the approach to public opinion and even expanded the practice. Today, we look back at the pre TR days and think of remarks like this one as “quaint.”
The vast majority of public funding for science is decided upon by peer review by scientists themselves. The government officials do not make most of the decisions. They rely on panels of scientists. The reason some of Venter’s early ideas were not funded was that the majority of scientists did not think Venter’s research was a good bet. Venter however is one of those scientists whose ideas have been very unorthodox and his great strength is that he does attack problems in unusual ways and he has had a number of major scientific breakthroughs. Venter is very persuasive and has found it easier to convince businessmen to fund him than the scientists who sit on the government science panels. However, American government money has funded many of the major breakthrough’s of our society including, manufacturing with interchangeable parts, railroads, the telegraph, computers, atomic energy, and the Internet.
While the President had total faith in American scientists, at the time the state of American physics was not world class in several key areas. Oppenheimer, was for example, the ONLY senior American theoretical physicist at the outbreak of the war, and he had been trained in Germany. What the President did not quite realize was how many of the key scientific positions on the Manhattan Project were foreign refugees who had fled the Nazis in Europe. Many American scientists and engineers did not want to go to Los Alamos where they could not leave for the duration of the war, had to give up their own personal research, and whose relatives who did not accompany them would never know where they were or what they were doing. But there were enough great American scientists who Oppenheimer recruited that combined with the Europeans formed the greatest and most effective concentration of scientific manpower working in history.
Snow was one of the first people to call attention to problem of the intellectual gulf between most educated people and scientists. As politicians generally fall into the former group, they have had a particularly difficult time dealing with scientific issues since the scientific revolution of the 20th century produced this cultural chasm. See {635974} for one of his conclusions.
Snow was one of the first people to call attention to problem of the intellectual gulf between most educated people and scientists. See {635971}. As politicians generally fall into the former group, they have had a particularly difficult dealing with scientific issues since the scientific revolution of the 20th century produced this cultural chasm.
Sir Edward "Teddy" Crisp Bullard FRS was a British geophysicist who is considered, along with Maurice Ewing, to have founded the discipline of marine geophysics. He developed the theory of the geodynamo, pioneered the use of seismology to study the sea floor, measured geothermal heat flow through the ocean crust, and found new evidence for the theory of continental drift.
