February 16, 2012
Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute’s Brainy Halls
From The Daily Beast:
One of the most impressive and eclectic intellectual groups in America gathers in a sprawling former mansion nestled in the foothills above Santa Fe. Once the private residence of a former U.S. Secretary of War, the space now houses the Santa Fe Institute. Lunchtime conversations range from game theory to historical linguistics to Sophocles. Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, Nobel Laureates and MacArthur geniuses wander the halls, scrawling equations on the window panes with erasable markers. The novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein calls it “everything I hoped academia would be as a graduate student.” She adds, “It was pure bliss.”
The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group of scientists frustrated with the narrow disciplinary confines of academia. They wanted to tackle big questions that spanned different fields, and they felt the only way these questions could be posed and solved was through the intermingling of scientists of all kinds: physicists, biologists, economists, anthropologists, and many others. Almost three decades after its founding, the institute now has 12 resident faculty members whose interests range from the archaeology of the American Southwest to the physics of cities. Various educational programs and conferences supply fresh infusions of graduate students, post-docs, and professors from around the country. Over the last few years SFI has even extended the logic of collaboration further by establishing a regular fellowship to bring a novelist, playwright, philosopher, or other humanist to the institute. Though he’s technically a member of the board of trustees, Cormac McCarthy has also become a vital part of the intellectual atmosphere.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 05:28 AM | Permalink
Comments
A completely worthless article about a worthless organization whose purpose, like most others, is to fleece money from government and other foolish institutions so they can sit around and talk over lunch with no responsibility to anyone or anything.
Ask youself these questions: Has one suffering cancer patient suffered any less or lived any longer as a result this high falutin extension of the academy?
Has there been one iota of less corruption in the failed war on cancer due to their politically correct effots over lunch?
These people gang rape the scientific method every day by negligently ignoring the experimenbts and facts on cancer elucidated by the genius in Germany Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D., likely because they hate his guts for remaining in Germany through the Hitler regime and therefore use this as an excuse not to read any of this 500 scientific papers on cancer and so many other significant subjects as well.
And of course even the quark theory is still nothing but a fairytale myth; no so called quark has ever been observed, no particle with fractional electric charge has every been observed and no convincing calculation from first principles has ever been accomplished calculating a speculated proton or neutron from any number of quarks because no one knows how to write the equations to be solved and no one knows how to solve them if they did write the equations.
How about the energy problem and the problem of dependence on petrochemicals? How about the failure of physicists to prove that the speculated fusion will solve our problems of energy independence after squandering so many billions of public and private dollars just like those squandered in the corrupt failed war on cancer? Blank out, not even mentioned in this worthless article.
Every taxpayer ought to learn a single, simple lesson from worthless institutes like this: Don't give them a single dime of your hard earned dinero!
Why these worthless intellectuals have not even enlightened us on the unanswered question of the birth status of our president or his background which is a carefully guarded secret. He appears to even be serving illegally in patent violation of our own Constitution.
Time would be better spent reading the enlightening articles at www.contrariams.com by E.J. Hoffman and the decline of the West by Spengler over a century ago.
Or, read, the article by Joseph Gold, M.D. at www.hydrazinesulfate.org elucidating how our government non scientists at the FDA, NIH and NCI lied about this substance on a government website.
Posted by: WJAbbe | Feb 16, 2012 7:07:53 AM
What, no dissolute poet to crank
up the craic? 3 quarts for Mr.
McCarthy and pats on the back all around.
Posted by: jh | Feb 16, 2012 8:20:55 AM
Maybe you're right Mr Abbe, but the unmistakable trail of ramblings you left everywhere on the internet tells us so much more about your absolute unwillingness to converse and interact in any meaningful way than it does about the truth and value of your ideas that one is forced upon the sad image of a unapproachable, possibly demented recluse.
Instead of worrying about cancer research and institutional funding, and who knows maybe one has a well warranted chip on his shoulders about it, I'd be much more worried about my own mental health. I'd get out the house, pick up gardening, seek help, maybe sell the house and explore the world, eat well, find love and give love.
Distastefully feces smearing all over comment threads at 7 in the morning is but a very poor cure for loneliness.
May you get better.
Posted by: Philippe | Feb 16, 2012 12:25:26 PM
The established goal por the creation of the SFI was decided on the month of May of 1987 by Wojciech H. Zurek who invited a multidisciplinary team, from all over the world, to attend an eclectic conference on Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information.
Ever since then, SFI has been a center --- not for the investigation of cancer or diabetes --- But, it has been a place where scientists and other intellectuals can interact with representatives of other disciplines, including theology, just to exchange ideas. Like an interdisciplinary think tank.
My wife and I spent five summers, between 1998 and 2003 attending the Institute conferences and seminars.
We enjoyed them.
We were greatly impressed by the opportunity to elbow with, and have lunch, with the likes of Kenneth Arrow, Murray Gell-Mann, and others.
If anyone wants to know what this marvelous institution is all about, read: Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, by George Johnson.
I enjoyed the posting.
Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | Feb 16, 2012 9:09:46 PM
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