I will never go into science because I just couldn’t play that game. The problem with science is that it’s full of centuries-worth of beauracrucy, red-tape, ego, tradition, pomp, busywork, constraint, heirarchies, power struggles, ethical debates, and the like. If you go into science it’s like being in the Roman army; you will be forced to march along as one part of a cube, never being able to run to the front lines, always constrained by scientist who’ve been in the game longer than you have and don’t want their ideas/egos/beliefs/way of life/et al trampled on. You’re now part of a system that’s designed to take longer than it should, so everyone works enough hours and gets paid enough money.
Your vague usage of “science” as if it is a uniform thing makes me think of some guy who is getting a business degree so he can “go into business.” You need to be specific. Your description matches no metric of “science” that I know. The especially juicy quote is “everyone… get paid enough money.” Especially on the academia side, you don’t go into science for money.
That’s why I want to do Science! instead of science. I want to someday seriously say “they all laughed at me! But I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!”
Yeah, but science is the Primary Change Driver of human history, so that’s why I chose it to rant on in this way; science, more than any other field, is supposed to move forward (theoretically, anyways).
Science does move forward, at a rapid pace. If anything people usually get pissed off at it moving too fast. Give me some examples where science has hunkered down and stayed put for generations.
I’ve worked in science for forty years. Few if any of the scientists I know would agree with much of the OP. Sure there’s red tape and bureaucracy, but scientists are freer in their careers than the vast majority of people.
The Middle Ages? I mean, while the Middle Ages saw a lot of development in terms of the institutionalization of science in universities, a lot of the scientific agenda was quite stagnant for a long time, showing little progress, and a lot of it was later discarded as misguided. If there is scientific progress, then at least the rate of progress is hardly constant.
That said, what the OP is saying about science (and the broad brush he is applying to ‘it’, whatever he understands it to be) suggest to me that he does not know what he is talking about.
I’m not a historian by any means but it’s my understanding that the idea of the Middle Ages as a period of scientific stagnation is no longer considered accurate, especially as we move away from a focus on western europe and take into account the scientific and mathematic progress being made in the same time period in places like what is now called India and the middle east.
As for my post, I was really thinking about fields that have remained stagnant up into the present day. If you’re refusing to go into science in 2012 because Galileo was censured by the Catholic Church, well. it’s a stand you’re taking.
Yea, as a working scientist, I’d say one of its draws is that its less rigid and hierarchical then many other professions. There’s a lot of freedom to pursue what you want, when you want. Also there’s very little “working enough hours so everyone can get paid”, almost no one is paid by the hour, and almost everyone puts in long hours so that they can finish specific projects. There’s no incentive to draw things out, people want to do more stuff then there are hours in the day to do it all.
(there is a lot of red tape, mainly because the US University system suffers from an over-abundance of administration, but most scientists get pretty adapt at navigating it pretty quickly without too much hastle)
Whatever the deployment, the Roman army was marked both by flexibility and strong discipline and cohesion. Different formations were assumed according to different tactical situations.
Repellere equites ("repel horsemen/knights") was the formation used to resist cavalry. The legionaries would assume a square formation, holding their pila as spears in the space between their shields and strung together shoulder to shoulder.
