Commu Professor
Socialist Organiser1982 1982-10-14Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 13 →
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workers. Haldane's science page was an (inevitably small) attempt at removing this advantage.
He opposed the elitist views of his bourgeois contemporaries who saw science as unteachable on a mass scale.
It was said that modern science could not be explained in anything less than massive. tome-like books, and that short popular articles were useless and superficial. These crițics argued that an astronomical discussion on news of say white dwarf stars being discovered in relative proximity to the sun (a typical Haldane discussion subject) necessitated knowledge of parallaxes and spectroscopics before they could be understood properly.
Haldane's reply was that astronomers don't need to be aware of the complexities of leather tanning before choosing a new pair of boots, and neither do laymen need detailed background knowledge to understand a short newspaper item on the stars. He thought that, 'the ordinary man must know something about the various branches of science... " because, like boots for the astronomer, "it affects his everyday life"
'Science Everyday Life' often used the Daily Worker's news items to lead in discussions on general science which might otherwise be somewhat abstract and boring. A 1938 ammonia explosion at the Eldorado Ice Cream works which killed a woman worker and injured many others provided a backdrop to a chemistry lesson on the properties and uses of ammonia.
Diçestion
Refrigeration was covered, 'but so was spectroscopie measurement of gas quantities in the atmosphere of distant planets. Digestion, and ammonia, followed in a subsequent issue of the paper. • An article on 'Mathematical Conundrums' digressed into the class nature of Ancient Greece in order to explain the continued hegemony of 'pure' over "applied' mathematics. Professor Haldane attributed this to Greek slaveowning society's contempt for manual Topics from genetics to grass pollen, from astrophysics to zoology, were covered in an extremely interesting and thought-provoking style.
Continued next week.
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Socialist Organiser no.104 October 14 1982 Page 14