De Revolutionibus Orbium Coalestium Published in 1543 by the Polish Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus ... All the planets including the Earth go around the sun ... Copernicus’s book is full of clues that hint at other past sources. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Science & Islam 3/3: The Power of Doubt
What’s astonishing about the accuracy of Al-Battani’s measurements is that he had no telescope. ibid.
What’s absolutely striking about the writings of Islamic scholars by the 9th century is the increasing use of the word ... which in English means doubts. ibid.
Abu al-Haytham hated this nonsensical contradiction. In the early 11th century he wrote Doubts on Ptolemy. ibid.
With Arabic trade came Arabic books. ibid.
Al-Kindi: It is fitting for us not to be ashamed of acknowledging truth, and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us. There is nothing of higher value than truth itself. It never cheapens or abases he who seeks. ibid.
The scientific process was born. Empires: Islam: Empire of Faith II: The Awakening, PBS 2000
Muslim hospitals had separate wards for patients suffering from different kinds of disease. Even mental illness was treated. ibid.
For me, science is an endless conversation about the world. Professor Armand Leroi, Aristotle’s Lagoon, BBC 2013
That is how science works: it’s a journey, a continuous exploration of how things work and who we are. Adam Rutherford, The Gene Code: Unlocking the Code, BBC 2011
The touch-paper was lit and everything changed. Dr Allan Chapman, Great Scientists: Aristotle, Channel 5 2004
Aristotle was the first scientist. His ideas were to resonate down the next two thousand years. ibid.
Plato’s academy was a private intellectual arena. ibid.
His approach to Nature was purely observational. ibid.
The History of Animals has been the most influential. ibid.
Aristotle realised that there must be a reason why everything is as it is. ibid.
Earth, water, air, fire: and each of these elements had its own natural place. ibid.
Aristotle can claim to be the first person to recognise that the universe works in a rational way. ibid.
Aristotle was forced once again to leave Athens. ibid.
Nil desperandum, as my old science mistress used to say. Murder Ahoy! 1964 starring Margaret Rutherford & Lionel Jeffries & Charles Tingwell & William Mervyn & Joan Benham & Nicholas Parsons & Stringer Davis & Miles Malleson & Henry Oscar & Derek Nimmo & Gerald Cross & Bernard Adams & Edna Petrie et al, director George Pollock, Rutherford at table
We have to find ways to amuse ourselves. We never really get a chance to get down to LA. There’s a lot of sex games on the go, wife-swapping and a lot of related nonsense. Scientists really aren’t any different from humankind. Just more inventive, that’s all. Invasion of the Bee Girls 1973 starring William Smith & Anitra Ford & Victoria Vetri & Cliff Osmond & Wright Knight & Ben Hammer & Anna Aries & Andre Philippe & Sid Kaiser & Katie A Saylor & William Keller & Beverly Powers et al, director Denis Sanders
To those who began the revolution in Russia seventy-five years ago science was a grand liberating force. They believed Karl Marx had discovered the scientific laws of society which they would now use to unlock the gates to a new world where everyone would be equal and free. But within twenty years the revolution was taken over by technocrats who looked down on the crowd below as though they were atoms. They were inspired not by Marx but by the laws of engineering. They believed they could transform the Soviet Union into a giant rational machine which they would run for their political masters. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box I: The Engineer’s Plot: A Fable From the Age of Science, BBC 1992
This is a story of science and political power. How the Bolshevik’s vision of using science to change the world was itself transformed. What resulted was as strange experiment far removed from the original aims of the revolution. From the beginning of the revolution, modern technology was central to the Bolshevik’s plans. Above all, the new power of electricity. ibid.
The aim of the Bolsheviks was to transform the people they ruled into what they called ‘scientific beings’, people able to understand and control the machines of the modern world rather than become enslaved to them. ibid.
The people to shape the future Soviet Union was passing to those who could build the new industrial society the Bolsheviks wanted so much. They were known as the bourgeois specialists, engineers from before the revolution who had the skills needed to master the modern technology. ibid.
At the end of 1930 the engineers’ dream suddenly became a nightmare: Stalin ordered two-thousand of them to be arrested, and eight of the most senior were put on a public show-trial. ibid.
‘Bolsheviks must master technology. It is time for the Bolsheviks themselves to become specialists. In the reconstruction period, technology decides everything.’ ibid. Stalin
He [Stalin] ordered engineering schools to be set up across the country to thousands of the young party faithful. ibid.
The model for this new simplified world was American … Gary, Indiana, is almost derelict. But seventy years ago it was a new kind of model city planned in an ordered way around a giant steel mill. To its builders it was a chance to break with the complexities of the past. ibid.
Those who lived in the American City were the new elite: a mixture of old Bolshevik commissars, foreign technicians and an ever increasing number of young red engineers. By the mid-30s the engineers had become the heroes in Soviet society. Praised by Stalin, they flaunted their new status. ibid.
In 1937 Stalin began another series of purges. This time his targets were the tens of thousands of old Bolsheviks. ibid.
It was a vision of a planned Utopia. Everything in the new Russia was to be designed and controlled from the centre of Moscow. ibid.
By the early ’50s vast reconstruction projects had changed the face of Soviet cities. ibid.
The age that we have just left – the 45 years since the end of the Second World War, was overshadowed by a strange partnership between Science and Fear. It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they could control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror; to do so they would use the methods of science. Out of this would come a new age free from the chaos and uncertainties that had led to terrible wars in the past. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity, BBC 1992
Research and Development: RAND was funded by the air force, but staffed by young academics who believed the scientific method could help bring the Cold War back under America’s control. ibid.
They were no longer advisers to the military, they had become the masters. ibid.
In a controlled nuclear war populations of cities would become like pawns in a game of bargaining with nuclear weapons. So the strategists persuaded America’s leaders to take civil defense seriously. ibid.
In the end President Kennedy ignored any idea of controlled war. Instead, he told the Russians that if they launched one missile from Cuba, he would retaliate with America’s entire arsenal. To the strategists, this threat was irrational and humiliating. ibid.
The systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon. McNamara’s wizz-kids were convinced that the battle against the Viet-Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way. ibid.
What they [the Strategists] left behind was MAD – mutual assured destruction – a giant system of nuclear defence with the two sides locked together, watching each other for the slightest move. But by the mid-’70s it seemed to have become an end in itself. ibid.
The system of deterrents had begun as rational. It now seemed a dangerous trap. ibid.
For the past thirty years politicians in Britain have tried to build a new prosperity. They wanted to make an old nation that had fallen behind in the world recapture the glories of its past. They turned for help to what they believed was a science of money. One after another Labour and Conservative governments became that if they followed what they thought were a set of scientific laws, the economy would grow faster. The perceived tide of decline could be reversed. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box: A Fable from the Age of Science III: The League of Gentlemen, BBC 1992
Politicians came to believe there was a technical way to make Britain great again. ibid.
In 1961 the Conservative government set up NEDDY, the National Economic Development Council, in what had been a gentlemen’s club in Westminster. It was advised by young economists convinced they could make the economy grow much faster. ibid.
They saw themselves as followers of the economist Maynard Keynes. He had shown how to manage an economy by increasing or decreasing demand. ibid.