This morning, local prof Jeffrey Shallit reminds us that complete and utter wanks should not try to do science:
Paul Davies, the British physicist and popularizer of science, wrote an astonishingly silly op-ed in the New York Times recently, in which he equates science and religion because both are based on "faith". It was a pleasure to see Davies' ideas completely shredded by Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carroll, and P. Z. Myers.
How silly is Davies? Well, get a load of this howler:
This isn't the first time Davies has said silly things. In The Fifth Miracle, for example, he attributes the ideas of algorithmic information theory to Gregory Chaitin, despite the fact that the Soviet probabilist Andrei Kolmogorov came up with them earlier (and despite the fact that nearly everyone calls the field "Kolmogorov complexity").
I mean, really ... crediting Chaitin for work originally done by Kolmogorov. What a clueless cretin. If only Davies had had the sense to ask, you know, an expert.
And, why no, I'm not just another pretty face. But thanks for asking.
2 comments:
You fucking moron.
Thanks for the hits!
;)
I can see now why you're so hostile to religion. When you observe these religious scientists becoming completely discombobulated and incoherent in the attempt to reconcile their religious mythology with science and desperately playing around with the definition of faith, you can't help but become irritated by the distractions and the waste of time they create. How can anyone who's progressed beyond grade 8 science assert something like this in all seriousness:
"to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You've got to believe that these laws won't fail, that we won't wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour."
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