Jasper Fforde Quotes

"Innovator" in this sense refers to one who innovates within Islam—who tries to change or reform the religion departing from the original,literal, message of the Prophet. This concept which was embedded into Islamic culture, became one of the intellectual barriers to scientific and technological development of literal islamists.

Huntington, one of the better known political scientists had been nominated for admission as a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He was generally considered a shoe-in. However, some of his research had used extensive mathematical analysis to prove his conclusions. Lang a gadfly had actually read Huntington’s peer reviewed published Journal articles and found that the mathematics was very faulty, both in its application and execution. He opposed Huntington’s election and proceeded to present Huntington’s mathematics and conclusions to the members, who were themselves the best scientists of many different disciplines. They all realized that the Huntington work was incorrect. Huntington argued that as a Political Scientist he was using mathematics as a way of conceptually illustrating his points and not in a rigorous manner. Huntington was not elected to the academy. Lang frequently would take scientific evidence offered in Congressional Hearings, analyze it and then send a package to the media and members of Congress showing the errors. See {508154} for his cutting style with poor science.

The conclusion that almost all scientists who have studied the problem of climate change and global warming us that there is a substantial change ongoing. That conclusion is reached as the result of literally thousands of observations and studies about the many aspects of climate change. Like any other science, a number of studies have flaws and there are many who fear that government funds will be used to cope with climate change at a cost to the economy. They point to the flaws of individual studies or researchers and have spent millions of dollars to produce uncertainty into the mind of the pubic and politicians. Science, however, ALWAYS has uncertainty and flaws are ALWAYS discovered in established scientific principles. It does not mean that these larger theories and principles are wrong if several of the studies or points are wrong and are understood in a larger and more sophisticated context. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity could be foolishly be called wrong because Einstein did not take account of what would become Quantum Mechanics and there were some contradictions. None the less Relativity is still the most important physical discovery of all time and influences all thinking in physics even though he could not account for the very small physics of quarks, electrons and other atomic particles.

More and more scientific researchers and technologists were using research tools that they did not fully understand and sometimes did not understand at all.

Referring to scientific and technological public policy issues such as the Space Defense Initiative, popularly known as "Star Wars"

He was known as “The Christian Cicero” because of his rhetoric. He contributed little original Christian thought but communicated it more so than anyone had done before. Interestingly, the early church fathers did not see the concept of a round earth as heretical—just absurd. When the idea began to be seen as potentially serious heresy would be almost 1000 years later.

This quotation illustrates a not uncommon problem of scientists trying to explain to sophisticated businessmen or politicians new ideas in science. They have no training in trying to separate the possible from the crackpot ideas or how to take an assertion and ask for the right kinds of evidence to test it. It is probably one of the mosot difficult problems for a politician in assessing new scientific and technological ideas. In this particular case, today we all know that glass fiber can carry an immense amount of digital information, but at the time it was as foreign and idea as if someone said that we can send electricity through the air to light bulbs with no wires. Yet that is just what some scientists have shown was possible recently. Most new science appears impossible and like magic. See {368568}.