Intellectuals Must Engage the Public, Not Hide From It

A final point, something I've written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers, and the last chapter of "Year 501"). There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like "mathematics for the millions" (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now large...

 Conceptual and Technological Revolutions

There are two kind s of scientific revolutions, those d riven by new tools and those d riven by new concepts. Thomas K uhn in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, talked almost exclusively about concepts and hard ly at all about tools. His id ea of a scientific revolution is based on a single example, the revolution in theoretical physics that occurred in the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics. This was a prime example of a concept-d riven revolution. K uhn's book...

 Science Communication: Definitions VS Metaphors

A hundred years ago, Charles Darwin could write books discussing the central problems of biology in language which was scientifically precise and still accessible to the general public. In those days the subject matter of biology was plants and animals. The language of Darwin was intelligible to experts and non-experts alike. One did not need a degree in {55} botany to understand the difference between a fern and a flower. Darwin could assume that his readers were familiar with the world of...

 Simple Explanation of Big O Part II

So if you want to find a name in a phone book of a million names you can actually find any name by doing this at most 20 times. In comparing search algorithms we decide that this comparison is our 'n'. For a phone book of 3 names it takes 2 comparisons (at most).For 7 it takes at most 3.For 15 it takes 4....For 1,000,000 it takes 20. That is staggeringly good isn't it? In Big-O terms this is O(log n) or logarithmic complexity. Now the logarithm in question could be ln (base e), log10, l...

 The "Sagan Effect"

With Cosmos, Sagan sought to put an end to the fear and to inspire the kind of wonder Hubble's lectures had inspired in the 1930s and 1940s and the Moon landing had inspired in 1969. The series was enormously successful. For the first time since Hubble, a huge audience was engaged in exploring the grand questions of life, nature, the structure of the uni¬ verse, mythology, and what it might all mean, how it might all fit together, the mystery of it all. It examined how our search for meaning...