GEOC 126 |
| Environmental science, as all other science, shows completeness and a logical development only in textbooks or reviews. Real science, like real people, abides in uncertainty, subjectivity, half-truths, and inconsistency. Given these characteristics, how can any science claim to be universal, and how can published scientific findings claim to be objective? For these well-known attributes of science to be valid, there must be invariants underlying the study of natural phenomena and the search for scientific truth. I shall discuss three such invariants: Exactitude (“Le bon Dieu est dans le détail”), Visibility (”La Condition Humaine”), and Multiplicity (“La Rayuela”), each of which is subject to transformations under two normative—and opposing—controls, constraint (“La Vie mode d'emploi”) and clinamen (“De Rerum Natura”). These invariants and controls lead to a general conclusion, that every scientific article must be regarded as a prolegomenon, each word of which is a fore-word, ever mindful of the words of John Ruskin: "The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed." |
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Physical Chemistry of Soil and Aquifer Systems: A Symposium in Honor of Garrison Sposito
1:30 PM-4:40 PM, Wednesday, 13 September 2006 Moscone Center -- Room 256, Oral
Division of Geochemistry |