Short stories of human inventions
Posts tagged Science
Science, Reason, and Robots
by Philip Yaffe
It is often said that what distinguishes true science fiction from space horse operas is its ability to examine fundamental questions of ethics, philosophy, and sociology in situations so remote from contemporary life that they can be considered with greater acuity and less emotion. I was recently reminded of this when I inadvertently reread a short story by Isaac Asimov.
Anyone who knows anything about science fiction, and indeed science itself, is almost certainly familiar with this name. Author or editor of more than 500 books, Asimov (1920 – 1992) was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He is universally recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction. He was also the nonpareil author of bestselling works on popular science, mathematics, religion, Shakespeare, and a wide variety of other topics.
The name of the short story is simply “Reason.” It recounts the intellectual confrontation between two astronauts manning a space station to channel solar energy back to an overcrowded Earth and one of their robot workers. They had assembled the robot from components sent from Earth about a week earlier.
This is an advanced robot compared to the others working on the
Medical Science Contributing Massively to the Fight Against Smoking Addiction!
Due to the large-scale harm meted out by smoking on human beings and the environment as a whole, numerous efforts have been initiated in order to curb the prevalence of smoking addiction. Smoking has been prevalent in the human society from a very early period and it is very hard to determine the exact circumstances that initially developed cravings for nicotine in the minds of human beings. When man was first introduced to nicotine addiction, he was not aware of the harmful effects of smoking. During that period, man was not knowledgeable enough to identify the disastrous effects of smoking and most particularly, at that time science was also not well-developed to ascertain the killing effects of smoking in the human body.
Slowly and gradually, man got hooked to this widespread addiction and with the passage of time it has almost become an urgent necessity for man. Even though there are people who are not addicted to tobacco smoking, still they are also harmed tremendously if they are exposed to passive smoking. Smoking is omnipresent in every nook and corner of the world. But unfortunately, even after being very well
Moving With the Gear -Train of Modern Science
Fire was the first discovery and wheel was the first invention. Since that time, we have traveled far. Science has taken us to territories we could not have envisaged some centuries ago. 20th century was when science really came into its own. It produced magic realism for us. Half of our present day inventions were inconceivable a century ago. Science had brought great laurels in every field but the one place where it has really shone is technology. Today, we have access to some of the most unbelievable technical inventions. A few centuries ago, a mastermind called Leonardo da Vinci made the first blue-print for an aero plane. Today, even the economy class, domestic seaters have become passé. It is time for the new avatars. Who would have thought that we could fly miles above the ground on a machine that is streamlined to fight air resistance? A few days ago, NASA launched a Space Shuttle called Discovery. It is supposed to use truss bands and solar wings to propose a new means of solar reception. Imagine, a tangible metallic object run on hydrogen fuel, stationary in space, thousand miles away, bringing us news, data and newer
Psychiatry: Fraud in the Name of Science and Humanism
On Saturday, 20/September, the XIVth World Congress of Psychiatry opens its doors in Prague, Chech Republic. Their motto is “Science and Humanism: For a Person-Centered Psychiatry” What a blatant lie! First of all, psychiatry is NOT a science. For what is science? Let’s see a few definitions: “a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject” “the study of the physical and natural world and phenomena, especially by using systematic observation and experiment” “the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding” “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method” How does this apply to psychiatry? “In 1886, Emil Kraepelin, the undisputed founder of modern psychiatry as a medical specialty and science, declared: “Our science has not arrived at a consensus on even its most fundamental principles, let alone on appropriate ends or even on the means to those ends.” Eighty years later, the encyclopedic American Handbook of Psychiatry opened with this statement: “Perhaps no other field of human endeavor is so … difficult to define as that of psychiatry.” Andrew Lakoff