Post 1: Beginning Stuff

I liked the discussion on natural philosophy, because it was interesting to see that you can determine some laws of physics purely through argument. Logical fallacies abound though, as the Social Theory of Gravity exemplified, and I’d have to say it’s probably better that we shoot for a more empirical understanding of the world. Then again, there are many things that are beyond the scope of our observational capacity. There’s no perfect answer.

We were all looking for harder answers in class, but when it comes down to it, the reason that ties were severed in the WWI era was because scientists are people too. They are not above the emotional reactions to war. I think we tend to put science, and therefore scientists, on a pedestal where they publish theories that no one understands. In reality though, they are regular folks that come home from the labs every night and listen to the news on their old timey radios and are upset by what they hear. The fact that there was a schism is not hard to understand.

Woodrow Wilson said that the American quarrel was with the German leaders, not the German people. When we discussed it in class, people were saying that Wilson was probably trying to avoid alienating the German people. I think that in addition to that we ought to consider America’s self-perception. In the pre-WWI period, we were only an emerging power, and there was not the same attitude about our dominance that there was by the post-WWII period. At the time that Wilson was saying this, America was considered to be an innocent on the world scene (Powers 3). Perhaps this supposed purity of the American spirit played into Wilson’s comment; he simply thought Americans were above such pettiness.

I think it is interesting that a scientist and an internationalist like Einstein was a Zionist. It seems that a person who advocated a free flow of scientific knowledge, and a pacifist would not stand for the division of people in any capacity. It’s an interesting contradiction.