[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
If acute intelligence, keen
> observation and astounding intuition were a reliable
> guide to nature, people would have devised starships
> thousands of years ago. People have always had these mental
> abilities, but they never did us much good until we harnessed
> them to instruments, machines, logic and objective methodology.
Never the less I disagree with your contention that it is the "only way"
to make sense of any information. That's just a tad too absolute a
conclusion for me to buy. For example, it's often been my highly
subjective and idle day dreams that spuriously flit across my
consciousness . . .
That's intuition. I listed that above, as one of things you have to harness
to instruments, machines, etc. You cannot do science without intuition. I
would love to see a billion robots working on research, but I doubt they
will ever serve as anything more than tireless lab assistants and bottle
washers.
Perhaps a theorist can work with a pencil and paper alone, but in
experimental and observational science instruments are the only source of
valid information. UFO-ology will never be a science until people devise
instruments to capture them, such digital cameras that trigger
automatically. (UFO-cams.) I suppose they will resemble the instruments
that international teams of amateur astronomers are using to document
asteroids.
There are times when the human senses substitute for "instruments." One of
the early breakthroughs in transistors came about when a chemist smelled
sulphur, and realized it was doping the devices. The human sense of smell
is remarkable, and in the early 50s it was still rivaled chemical assay
techniques. Ed Storms says that he can see some details and contrast in a
microscope with the naked eye that a digital or film camera will not capture.
- Jed
