Put Your Feet Where Your Values Are: March For Science

Take out your mobile phone and give it a good look. Curiosity made that. Curiosity coupled with intense concentration, wild imagination, bold hypotheses, and years of experimental toil to validate them. The slim device in your hand encapsulates 500 years of physics. Newtonian mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism, Einstein’s relativity, Bohr’s atomic theory, Turing’s universal computer, Schrödinger’s quantum wave function, Feynman’s diagram: all these and more streamed into the phone you hold in your hand. And that’s just one branch of science. Somewhere on your upper arm is a tiny scar that represents your vaccination against tuberculosis — the White Death, a plague that claimed the lives of one in five young Americans before the twentieth century. Today, in just one month’s edition of “Scientific American” there are stories about a realistic plan to send tiny spacecraft to the nearest star within our lifetimes, a tested method of redesigning T-cells drawn from our own bodies to be hypervigilant cancer killers, an ingenious technique to discover the true coloration of dinosaurs, new ways to test robotic systems to determine if they truly possess humanlike intelligence, and a practical experiment to determine if alleviating a mother’s poverty will improve the brain of her newborn child during the first three years of life. If nothing on that list thrills you, stirs hope in y...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news