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25 November, 2008

To All of You Bashing The Dancing Wu Li Masters

I know it's not pure quantum physics. I know that conflating Eastern mysticism with science is a somewhat silly thing to do. But it was my gateway drug into the hard sciences, it made me appreciate the fact that science was a human endeavor, not just a matter of cold calculation, and it's still a beautiful book.

So there.
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7 comments:

  1. Blake StaceyNovember 25, 2008 at 9:33 AM

    Hey, I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

    And what's this about a "gateway drug"? Bollocks. I say, if the hard drugs are worth taking, they're worth taking right away. None of this pussyfooting around.

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  2. UnknownNovember 25, 2008 at 9:58 AM

    I've never read it, but I trust you enough to believe it's not some Deepak Chopra true bastardization of science. Science is a cold, hard public approach to knowledge, sometimes you need to add more human elements to make it a good story. That's what science fiction is anyway, innit?

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  3. Cujo359November 25, 2008 at 11:52 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Cujo359November 25, 2008 at 12:48 PM

    I feel .. so bad.

    Actually, I don't take football seriously, either, but I still watch it. Sometimes.

    You don't need to take something seriously to enjoy it.

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  5. Blake StaceyNovember 25, 2008 at 1:43 PM

    Science is a cold, hard public approach to knowledge, sometimes you need to add more human elements to make it a good story.

    I don't buy it. Science is an activity undertaken by human beings. If the path to a particular discovery weren't interesting to the people working on it, they never would have gotten there. I've yet to find a case where troweling on passions which weren't in the original history made that history better. If the beauty of knowledge needs an airbrush, you're doing it wrong.

    That's what science fiction is anyway, innit?

    Science fiction is labelled and sold as fiction. It asks "What if?" but does not directly say what is. I'm 130,000 words into an SF novel, and I've tried to portray the process of science as realistically as I can, but I haven't footnoted the pages with annotations saying which "facts" come from our world and which belong to the world I made up. That, I leave to the reader to discover.

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  6. Blake StaceyNovember 25, 2008 at 1:44 PM

    (I have a cold. I'm cranky. I probably shouldn't even be on the Internet right now.)

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  7. UnknownNovember 26, 2008 at 12:14 PM

    No worries. I think we're all hoping for the same thing: for people to understand and be intrigued by the scientific method.

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