"Bob Myers" hath wroth:

"Jeff Liebermann" wrote in message
.. .
audience. My guess(tm) is that reality and accurate science are
fundamentally boring,

I think a lot of people perceive them as such, but that
perception is, without fail in my experience, the result of
a nearly-complete ignorance of these subjects on the parts
of those people.

Have you ever attended a meeting or event about something you really
don't care about? The lady friend has dragged me to horse shows, dog
shows, cat shows, and various cultural events, where it was a major
accomplishment for me to stay awake. Yet to her, it was the highlight
of excitement and of great interest. In other words, science and
technology may be interesting to you and I, but to many, it's just a
big boring waste of their time.

There's also the problem of what pretends to be education. Ask even
the most basic physics question to a member of the GUM (great unwashed
masses), and you'll get some rather strange answers. Jay Leno likes
to do that on the streets. My version of this is to watch a movie
thriller and try to find the physical impossibilities. I got my
introduction to this while attending the movie "The Poseidon
Adventure", set in a capsized ocean liner. In attendance was a horde
of engineering students from the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey. I caught a few of the howlers, but they were seeing much
more wrong with the physics. Since then, I've made it a pointing out
the impossibilities to the point where none of my friends will sit
through a movie with me. So much for the joy of physics.

(...)Most of
what passes for interesting material on the Art Bell show
would be kicked out as too dull, too unimaginative, and/or too
mundane by any decent science-fiction editor.
Bob M.

Wrong. Science fiction has mutated into social adventure, space
opera, and historical fantasy. I haven't seen any really technical
science fiction in many years. The reason is that reality just
doesn't sell, while fantasy and nonsense sell quite well. One of my
friends is fairly well know multidisciplinary scientist, who gets his
thrills seeing his name appear on the credits for perhaps 300 msec.
For this honor, he acts as scientific advisor to several movie makers
and TV shows. In private, he complains that he is almost universally
ignored and is only asked if doing this or that physical impossibility
is "believable". He refers to the process as tele-gullibility. Even
NASA gets into the act. I was watching a simulation of a rocket to
Mars, complete with the sound of the rocket motors whizzing by the
moon. Too bad there's no air around to conduct the sound. Oh well.

The Art Bell show was the latest manifesting of the old circus "geek
show", where weird people, animals, and objects were presented as
real. Nothing really new except that now the presenting is done by
the audience. In the case of usenet news, there is no circus and
everything comes from the audience.

The real danger of all this is NOT in the average readers inability to
distinguish between reality and rubbish, but in the intellectual
establishment declaring that they have a monopoly on knowledge. When
science and physics gets to the point that it can't handle any
critical nonsense, fantasy, speculation, or even lunacy, then it runs
a high risk of ossifying progress into dogma. I would prefer
tolerating Art Bell with the hope that one small kernel of something
new might emerge, than to summarily dismiss all his rantings as
unscientific hogwash. Just think of how much science fiction has
inspired rather than predicted technical progress. Your choice.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558