Wednesday, May 04, 2016
Not the point
Seems to be a halfbaked campaign against Neal deGrasse Tyson as the public voice of "science". The campaign knocks him for being trivial or missing FINE points.
I don't have any problem with deGrasse as such. He's a good teacher and a good publicist. Sometimes you have to be trivial to hold public attention.
The complainers are missing the BIG problem. From Arthur Clarke to Sagan to deGrasse, the loudest voices for "science" have always focused on ASTRONOMY. The media concentrate heavily on every new failure from NASA, always treating it as a success and reminding us of the delusional spinoffs.
Astronomy is the least useful branch of 'hard' science by a long long long long long moon shot. Astronomy has given us NOTHING of value.
Since the age of Edison, ALL the action and advancement has been in MATERIALS. The inventive part of electronics was complete in 1906 with the triode tube. The inventive part of automobiles was done in 1912 with the electric starter. All necessary inventions were in place by those dates. Everything since then has been MATERIALS and manufacturing methods.
And yet nobody even mentions MATERIALS. The best spokesman for MATERIALS, Rustum Roy, died several years ago without ever appearing on TV.
¶ 1:51 AM 
