"James P. Hogan - Kicking the Sacred Cow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

Christmas Day because the paint was never dry.
Although Don was not a scientist, working with him imbued in me an attitude of mind that valued
the practicality of science as a way of dealing with life and explaining much about the world. Unlike all of
the other creeds, cults, and ideologies that humans had been coming up with for as long as humanity had
existed, here was a way of distinguishing between beliefs that were probably true and beliefs that were
probably not in ways that gave observable results that could be repeated. Its success was attested to by
the new world that had come into existence in—what?—little more than a century. From atoms to
galaxies, phenomena were made comprehensible and predictable that had remained cloaked in
superstition and ignorance through thousands of years of attempts at inquiry by other means. Airplanes
worked; magic carpets didn't. Telephones, radio, and TV enabled anyone, at will, anytime, to
accomplish things which before had been conceivable only as miracles. The foot deformities that I had
been born with were corrected by surgery, not witch doctoring, enabling me later to enjoy a healthy life
mountain hiking and rock climbing as a teenager. Asimov's nonfiction came as a topping to the various
other readings I devoured in pursuit of my interest: Science was not only effective and made sense; it
could actually befun too!
I would describe science as formalized common sense. We all know how easily true believers can
delude themselves into seeing what they want to see, and even appearances reported accurately are not
always to be relied upon. (My older brother was something of a card sharp, so there was nothing
particularly strange in the idea of things sometimes not being what they seemed.) What singled science
out was its recognition of objective reality: that whatever is true will remain true, regardless of how
passionately someone might wish things to be otherwise, or how many others might be induced to share
in that persuasion. A simple and obvious enough precept, one would have thought. Yet every other
belief system, even when professing commitment to the impartial search for truth, acted otherwise when
it came to recruiting a constituency. And hence, it seemed, followed most of the world's squabbles and
problems.
So it was natural enough for me to pursue a career in the Royal Aircraft Establishment,
Farnborough—a few miles from where Grace and Don lived—after passing the requisite three days of
qualifying examinations, as a student of electrical, mechanical, and aeronautical engineering. On
completion of the general course I went on to specialize in electronics. Later, I moved from design to
sales, then into computers, and ended up working with scientists and engineers across-the-board in just
about every discipline and area of application. Seeing the way they went about things confirmed the
impressions I'd been forming since those boyhood days of working with Don.
The problems that the world had been getting itself into all through history would all be solved
straightforwardly once people came around to seeing things the right way. Wars were fought over
religions, economic resources, or political rivalries. Well, science showed that men made gods, not vice
versa. Sufficiently advanced technologies could produce plenty of resources for everybody, and once
those two areas were taken care of, what was there left to create political rivalries over? Then we could
be on our way to the stars and concern ourselves with things that were truly interesting.
When I turned to writing in the mid seventies—initially as a result of an office bet, then going
full-time when I discovered I liked it—a theme of hard science-fiction with an upbeat note came
naturally. I was accused (is that the right word?) of reinventing the genre of the fifties and sixties from the
ground up, which was probably true to a large degree, since I had read very little of it, having come into
the field from a direction diametrically opposed to that of most writers. The picture of science that I
carried into those early stories reflected the idealization of intellectual purity that textbooks and
popularizers portray. Impartial research motivated by the pursuit of knowledge assembles facts, which
theories are then constructed to explain. The theories are tested by rigorous experiment; if the predicted
results are not observed, the theories are modified accordingly, without prejudice, or abandoned.
Although the ideal can seldom be achieved in practice, free inquiry and open debate will detect and
correct the errors that human frailty makes inevitable. As a result, we move steadily through successively
closer approximations toward the Truth.