Stephen Wolfram and Jacob Bronowski!

I wrote most part of this post on Oct 25. I guess I fell asleep before I could finish, edit and publish it. Got the chance to do so now.

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It's late but I gotta wait a bit more before leaving the Ghormeh-Sabzi in the slow-cooker and going to bed. It's an Iranian dish, basically a stew that is served with rice. These stews are called "khoresh"es and are a major part of the Iranian cuisine. 

Today I went to Stephen Wolfram's talk in the physics department. Honestly?! It was as boring as hell. Any new stuff?! Not more than what I learned watching his TED talk and reading his wiki page, which I guess is written by himself. C, my roommate also thinks he wrote that wiki page. I remembered an interview I read loooong time ago, back in high school days, with Freeman Dyson where he points out one cannot find smarter people than Einstein and Dirac and how both of them got drifted away from the mainstream science as they got older and older. Dyson explains that both of these geniuses, after the age of thirty lost their connection with experiment, which was once there major inspiring agent. They got more and more obsessed with abstraction and mathematical elegance and basically their philosophy led them to some kind of isolation from the scientific community. 

I remember reading somewhere in Jacob Bronowski's "The ascent of man" that any field of science is subject to the viewpoint of its founders and if someone else would have started the same field, it'd have probably be totally different from what it is now. I guess what scientists like to think or even take for granted is that scientific method leads you to an objective understanding of the natural world. Frankly I doubt if that is true. Quantum Mechanics showed us how influential the role of the observer is and even in a non-Quantum world I have a hard time believing that any human activity, scientific enterprise included, can be totally free of subjective stances. One can say well, natural science is less subjective than arts for example, cause we have at least the scientific method which tries to minimize the effect of experimenter's ideology or prejudgment on the results but I don't think that effect can be ever reduced to zero. 

Later in the day I was talking to a friend who is a CS grad student. I was telling him even if an objective criteria could exist which confirmed that for example what Wolfram says is the "right way" of studying the universe, needless to mention I doubt if such a thing can exist at all, unless the main part of the scientific community is investigating in it, that viewpoint or whatever will die very soon and the other mainstream "ways" will survive under the name of scientific activity.