Perhaps the new administration will be more likely to revisit this farce of an inquiry on Dr. Mann’s conduct. It may be a good idea to send a letter to the new President, after giving him/her an opportunity to get oriented in his/her new position, asking that this inquiry be revisited based on a new standard of responsibility, rather than being based soley on the amount of money a staffer brings to the University.

It seems that both the football program and the climate studies area have both been untouchable-until today!

Rip

Then we send out our first deep-space probes…and discover they are being affected in ways that don’t fit the math particularly well. And thus we discover that there’s always a lot more to be learned

I’m responding to Pat below by the way. Thank you for the perspective on why 26-28 (or thereabouts) was so extraordinarily creative. I certainly agree that it wasn’t just about experimental data. Planck opened the door but the quality of other men – not least Dirac – was I believe critical. Iron sharpens iron. Polkinghorne’s first-hand report from Dirac, as he taught undergraduates the maths of quantum physics in the late 70s, left a deep impression.

I won’t comment on the program of Enlightenment rationality part, much though I’m interested in the positives and negatives (like Isaiah Berlin) of the Big E. Because my focus really wasn’t at all on Polkinghorne as priest but as reporter of Dirac’s testimony in the 50s, in the light of the fascinating point you made about Poincare (with which I fully agreed).

Indeed, I hesitated to mention Michael Polanyi’s conversion to Catholicism but it seemed necessary somehow in the light of the shocking sequel at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Here’s another Jewish witness who as far as I know didn’t see fit to convert, the pathologist Miklos Nyiszli:

Thus I learned that the experiments performed here were checked by the highest medical authorities at one of the most famous scientific institutes in the world.

That’s from Edwin Black’s War Against the Week, p360. Only published 2003, it should be required reading for any of us considering how science (or the pretense of science) might also be going wrong in our own generation.

I believe the Paleoclimate Reconstruction Challenge has finished. The original website is 404, but it seems the results can be found on the NOAA website. Any chance of an update?

If Lubos is interested in Polkinghorne, feel free to continue this discussion on his site.