During the Second World War, Polish-Jewish mathematician, Jacob Bronowskia, a member of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command (RAF Bomber Command), was tasked with creating statistically robust bomb trajectory and kill radius maps. Being equipped with a PHD from Cambridge University in mathematics, Jacob’s kill radius projections were groundbreaking—he included in his projections not only current innovative statistical and mathematical theory, but he also discovered additional groundbreaking mathematical formulas that are still used today in kill radius projections. Unfortunately, while his formulas and projections looked great in theory on paper, these same formulas were the cause of over 600,000 civilian deaths in Nazi Germany and tens of thousands more deaths, by way of nuclear bombs, in Japan. At the end of the war, Jacob Bronowskia, seemingly tormented with guilt by the role he played in thousands of civilian deaths, dedicated his life to teaching others through the BBC series, “The Ascent of Man.” These television series included everything from explanations of evolution to mathematics to psychology and religion. In the final episode of the series, and towards the end of Jacob’s life, Jacob revisits his role as a researcher for RAF bomber command by visiting Auschwitz thereby confronting the location where his ancestors were killed and confronting the grim reality of his own actions. During this visit, kneeling down and scooping up in his hand a pile of muddied-human ashes, Jacob, sobbing, cries out ...

"It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken. I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people."

Religion claims to know all, whereas science claims to know only that which our human capacity, human experiences, and history has shown us up to point "time = 0"; that is, up to right this very second, right now, nothing more, nothing less.

Youtube video of Jacob Bronowskia delivering the quote/speech above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlDumTPyn00



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/20/2012 05:30PM by sillysally.

Cosmos was THE best.