"Who Got Einstein's Office"

[fiefoe]

Outside IAS:

__ ...the once quite wild and woolly Gravity Research Foundation of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The Foundation was started back in the 1940s by stock-market mogul Roger Babson as a way of encouraging scientists to find ways of controlling the force of gravity.
__ ...in a shaft of the Homestake Gold Mine, 4,500 feet below the village of Kellogg, South Dakota. "If you go there," John Bahcall says, "there is a small hotel which is the only place in the world where I know you can get a neutrino martini. "

Philosophy of religion largely cured me of religion, so I'm not surprised that philosophy of science is quite a pill to some too.

• Kuhn called these common beliefs "paradigms," and said that the important thing about them is that they tend to operate as blinkers and blinders, forcing scientists to see reality in certain specific ways as opposed to others.
• for a while your adroitness in juggling paradigmatic shifts and cosmic revolutions became an index of your meta-scientific enlightenment and degree of intellectual chic.
• Only after a number of such transformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of the scientist's world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as the scientist does." ...  (Scientific revolutions) occur when one paradigm is replaced by another. Mechanism replaces teleology; quantum-mechanical randomness replaces mechanism.
  

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