Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p. 216.
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Stewart Brand
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The world is changed irreversibly by anything and by everything. But scientific accomplishment is demonstrably sometimes submerged and almost surely sometimes quite erased by events driven by forces other than scientific inquiry. Meanwhile, what enables scientific progress is social context. A liberal social order fosters it; other social orders tend to displace it with processed masquerading as science.