| HN Mirror

I like science as a concept I think it's a cool technique. I liked science courses I took, and I got very high grades, partly because I understood it's dark side, its secret double life as a whore, and knew when an experiment in class would just never produce the results the teacher could buy into for the grade I needed for the college admission results I wanted. The teachers were good, but usually didn't have the deep knowledge of physics to see when there were fucky things at work in the experiments.

Feynman talks about this in one of his books, he was going to Brazil to help them out with efforts to educate their students in science. So they had a test--I believe a standardized test, multiple choice, or there was a rubric with a right answer and a protocol for demerits for other answers--and it was about a cylinder filled with water rolling down a ramp and onto a table. The right answer was a wrong answer. Feynman told them, clearly you did not actually perform this experiment, the inertia of the water--some turbulence thing--makes it roll...from memory I think it was a seventh longer roughly. Feynman knew. I believe the Brazilians actually then carried out the experiment and saw it knew its master, Feynman was right theoretically. Hey first the teacher must learn, then the teacher can teach the student. So for teachers like that, who didn't have that Feynman scientific depth--but were honest and dedicated and helped us learn--for them you had to massage the numbers. And that massage always had to lead to a happy ending. Or no elite college admission.

So well I was a great student, perhaps the best mathematician in the grade, while also very into science very early on--loved it, loved studying insects, loved carrying out experiments, loved my chemistry kit, my electronics kits, loved soldering to the point I made a sculpture by soldering (wire and lead, the electric hound from Fahrenheit 451), plus I fixed all kinds of stuff around the house, and understood the material, so when it came to pulling numbers out of my ass, a strict necessity in that context, I pulled out some pretty good believable numbers consistent with theory but with maybe a little noise, not to the level of making up systematic error for credibility, but yeah a little noise fudging. And that's what's on the curriculum, get real, a friend actually performed tons of experiments verifying Newtonian physics, only he had to pull numbers every time, Newton did not check out experimentally, my friend had to massage the numbers heavily according to the theory. And they all had happy endings.

Like science is good but it depends on the honesty of scientists, the academic environment, and even then, needs to be taken with a little sodium chloride.