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By Amin Dharamsi
Last week, President Barack Obama reported the State of the Union to Congress and the nation, as required by the Constitution. The first such address was delivered by George Washington in 1790, although it was not called that yet. The young nation, having only recently emerged from a bloody struggle for freedom against the mighty colonial superpower of England, was at a critical point in its history.
Washington's short address contains this remarkable excerpt: "... Nor am I less persuaded that you will agree with me in opinion that there is nothing that can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of Science and Literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."
Washington knew that even though, or perhaps precisely because, there were pressures for the meager resources of the emerging nation, it was necessary to support science and literature. He was sure that the material and emotional well-being of a populace could be assured only if it possessed and treasured intellectual curiosity and an interest in acquiring knowledge.
In recognizing the importance of science, Washington was by no means an exception among the founders of the United States. Thomas Jefferson was a polymath, having deep interests in science and the arts. And Benjamin Franklin needs no introduction to anyone interested in science and its applications.
The U.S. has been lucky. It has had leaders who understood the need for supporting science at a crucial time of its life - when it was in its infancy. But today, all is not necessarily well in the one country in human history that has undoubtedly played the largest role in the advancement of science and its applications - so far.
Science did not arise suddenly in one place at one time. Neither has it been a straight path. Rather, it has emerged after numerous dead ends when we spent quite a bit of time basically groping. But today people in the most remote regions of the world function with at least some knowledge and benefits of science and modern technology that it has enabled.
Science keeps progressing, and today we are in a remarkable age. For example, neuroscience - coupled with our increasing knowledge of molecular biology, genetics and the increasingly more sophisticated scientific instruments such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (f-MRI) - allow us to begin to make sense of what many only recently thought would be unexplainable aspects of human existence: our emotions, our mental afflictions and even the origins of our moral judgments.
We have a long way to go, but the progress we have made has come from the hard work of a lot of people and the leadership provided by forward-looking thinkers who injected science into the DNA of America.
The next time you hear someone belittling science, as in the science of evolution, or refer to climate change as a fraud, try to look deeper. Dig up material now available at your fingertips at the computer keyboard because of the very science that is being attacked.
Make up your mind. But let your mind be informed, lest the "candle in the dark" that is science be extinguished.
Amin Dharamsi is professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Old Dominion University. Email: adharams@odu.edu.
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Betraying Science
I've been a nerd since before the term was coined. But a lifelong love of science cannot be an excuse for failing to call foul when scientists lie. To do so destroys the trust that makes science something better than superstition.
Without getting into whether the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming is correct or not(it may be partly true) there is no question that climatologists at NASA, the East Anglia Climate Research Unit and the UN's IPCC have exaggerated both the scope of AGW and the degree of certainty of their findings.
They have engaged in suppression of dissent by control of research funding, exclusion of valid criticism from publication, and destruction of data needed for replicating their results. They have corrupted the peer review process.
The IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is filled with distortions of the underlying results, to the extent that many of the scientists listed as authors have asked to have their names removed from citation.
Graphs have been truncated with the intent to mislead, by excluding time periods that cannot be reconciled with climate models, and charting of data was deleted when it disclosed a variance between instrument and proxy results.
None of that disproves AGW theory, but it does prove that we cannot claim to know the truth until the deceptions have been rooted out.
When we fail to cry foul when such things are done, that is the ultimate betrayal of science, as we rob science of its integrity when we fail to speak up.