Harry Collins

On his book Gravity’s Ghost: Scientific Discovery in the Twenty-first Century

Cover Interview of June 21, 2011

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“I try to understand the nature of knowledge by watching it being made.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

”That millions of people revere Steven Hawking’s popular books is worrying; those millions surely do not understand them, so the works of science are being treated as something holy in themselves.”

On the second:

”Science contains a wonderful set of values at its heart. If scientists do not understand this, then science could become just another arm of capitalism, politics, or the entertainment industry.”

polemics / science / religion / ideology / sociology / research methodology / physics / science studies / weber joseph / gravitational waves /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009