Oh, crap. This is another big loss. Kroto won the Nobel 20 years ago, and most admirably, turned his fame and money towards advancing science education. Somehow, I’ve been fortunate to have had a number of lengthy conversations with him at meetings, and while one thing we had in common was atheism (he was also a freethinker and humanist and vocal atheist), it seemed we always spent most of our time talking about science education and his work on global educational outreach. He was opinionated and outspoken, but always broad-minded.
He also knew that science is a philosophy.
I always enjoyed talking with Harry. I’m going to miss that.
Bummer. He was a great guy. I met him once when he came to speak at our Chem Dept. Highly energetic personality. Sad to learn that he died.
A life well lived, and so one should always remember that first and foremost.
I am glad to hear that I am not the only one who thinks that science is a philosophy. Of course it is a philosophy, in the cladistic sense, b/c it originated as a philosophy. I have received some rather sharp rebukes from people who think that it is not. But in those cases I suspect it is b/c they like to think philosophy is dead. I don’t want to get into all of that here, except to say that that view is like saying that movies are crap just b/c a lot of them are bad, and a lot of movies in the future will also be bad.
“… except to say that that view is like saying that movies are crap just b/c a lot of them are bad, and a lot of movies in the future will also be bad.”
Fortunately, science has a built in self correction mechanism, while unfortunately, movies do not. I see that even more comic book and video game based movies are coming in the near future. A lot of the movie “script writers” and “producers” appear to be clones with the same genetic defects.
re 3:
yeah, Science self-corrects while movies do not. Agreed.
it is odd that movies seem to be trying to self-correct with all the sequels and reboots, being the current fad.
Yet the reboots seem to just repeat the previous mistakes with fancier SFX; instead of correcting the errors. ST:Into Darkness is a prime example of attempting to reboot a classic and throwing in lots of nonsensical mistakes to try to be an obvious not-a-reboot.
And on and on, the list of recent reboots that still fail to fix the original is too long the enumerate. …
SW: TFA – episode VII, seems to have actually made a pretty good effort at rebooting episode IV, cleaning up some of the errors of the original, thus providing a pretty fun movie as a result.
Of course science is a philosophy; it’s a system of knowledge!