The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

In 1954, the late honored Albert Einstein astonished more laymen than fellow-scientists when he said that if he were about to choose a career, “I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or peddler... .”

Norbert Wiener had written, earlier: “. .. The degradation of the position of the scientist as an independent worker and thinker to that of a morally irresponsible stooge in a science-factory has proceeded even more rapidly and devastatingly than I had expected. . . .”

And earlier still, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the explosion of the first atom bomb at Alamagordo, and could think of nothing but the line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death—the shatterer of worlds.”

The quotations are all from Lewis S. Feuer’s The Scientific Intellectual (Basic Books, 1963), and his conclusions seem inescapable. The Laugh-O-Rama of Big Business Research is no happenstance; the decline of creative scientific thought is a natural consequence of the compromise—and compromising—of scientists.

Science: A broad inquiry, by means of numerous subsidiary disciplines, into the true nature of the universe. Its chief exponents liken it to humanity in general, whose perpetuation requires the intermittent observation of its own errors.

Scientism: The promotion of goods, services, values or decisions in the name of scientific method. Hence science as practiced. One who practices science is called a scientist. The practice allows for a large variety of human inclinations. Scientists are variously idealistic, ambitious, ordinary, academic, practical, foolish, careless, trustworthy, decent, and indecent; some are comic, some tragic, some vulgar, and some are in the grand tradition.

(The Doomsday Dictionary)