Read on Twitter
Good question here. And while I don't have a definitive answer, I do have some observations . . . https://twitter.com/choo_ek/status/1291789978716868608
This artifact from the past is almost unthinkable today. A noted physicist giving a public lecture to a packed hall, explaining why time flows in one direction:
I have a set of 53 books published by the University of Chicago, called "The Great Conversation." Runs from Homer to William James. The idea is that to understand modern thought and history, this background provides a foundation. But that sort of begs the question . . .
Why, exactly, would one wish to understand anything? In the past — around the 1950s — there was a bourgeois fear of being thought unlettered. The dread of being at a cocktail party and unable to grasp the flow of conversation, with literary allusions sailing over your head.
Thus emerged publications like Scientific American, Lancelot Hogben's "Mathematics for the Million," or more recently "Sophie's World." The idea being that understanding reality is possible in the sense that objective truth can be grasped if one puts some effort into it.
To be a functional, operative citizen required something quite different from today's lantern-jawed pugnacious insistence that scientists have to explain things in layperson terminology to win the debate against ignorance. Belief is now, for many, equivalent to knowledge.
"I don't believe in . . . the evolutions." "I don't believe in . . . the global weathers." As if these matters are up for discussion. It doesn't matter if thousands of people have spent their entire lives researching something. A shred of doubt negates it all.
Now, scientists and researchers are anathema to conservative thought. They are presumed to be liberals with an anti-capitalist, anti-American weltanschauung funded by shadowy Jewish bankers or Chinese communists. Per Feynman on entropy, this may be a one-way street.
