As one of the community of British historians of science, I wish to
disassociate myself from Judith Field's gratuitously offensive and
public reply to the request for assistance from Jo Murphy of the BBC.
Many of have spent years trying to get the media to take an interest in
our subject, by gentle encouragement and quite diplomacy. This foolish
outburst has done our cause no good at all, at least in one corner of
the BBC.
Martin Campbell-Kelly
University of Warwick
"J. V. Field" wrote:
>
> Dear Ms Murphy,
>
> Your request may be a spoof? Almost all scientific and
> philosophical explanations turn out to be at least partly incorrect,
> though they seem reasonable in their own time. And some pretty
> bizarre ideas, such as that the Earth goes round the Sun, turn out to
> be reasonable after all.
>
> The concept behind your programmes seems to be in a spirit
> strongly at variance with that of today's historians of science. We
> try to take ideas for what they are in their own time and milieu.
> You seem likely to end up throwing brickbats at people for
> disagreeing with your own ideas about how the Universe works. This
> seems to me to be a rather unpleasant form of self-congratulation.
> And somewhat inappropriate in the present state of the world: there
> are huge numbers of people going hungry or dying of diseases that
> would be preventable or curable if they lived in a richer country.
> The theories may look great but we are not much good at getting them
> to help in the real world.
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> J. V. Field
--
Martin Campbell-Kelly, Dept of Computer Science
University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, U.K.
voice: +44 24 7652 3193 fax: +44 870 122 8608
email: [log in to unmask]
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