Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Antiscience
comeuppance. Science envy could be transcended. Those who
have pursued other paths to knowledge, those who have secretly
harboured beliefs that science has scorned, could now have their
place in the Sun.
The rate of change in science is responsible for some of the fire
it draws. Just when we've finally understood something the
scientists are talking about, they tell us it isn't any longer true.
And even if it is, there's a slew of new things - things we never
heard of, things difficult to believe, things with disquieting
implications - that they claim to have discovered recently. Scientists
can be perceived as toying with us, as wanting to overturn
everything, as socially dangerous.
Edward U. Condon was a distinguished American physicist, a
pioneer in quantum mechanics, a participant in the development
of radar and nuclear weapons in World War II, research director
of Corning Glass, director of the National Bureau of Standards,
and president of the American Physical Society (as well as, late in
his life, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, where
he directed a controversial Air Force-funded scientific study of
UFOs). He was one of the physicists whose loyalty to the United
States was challenged by members of Congress - including
Congressman Richard M. Nixon, who called for the revocation of
his security clearance - in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The
superpatriotic chairman of the House Committee on
Un-American Activities (HCUA), Rep. J. Parnell Thomas,
would call the physicist 'Dr Condom', the 'weakest link' in
American security, and - at one point - the 'missing link'. His
view on Constitutional guarantees can be gleaned from the
following response to a witness's lawyer: 'The rights you have are
the rights given you by this Committee. We will determine what
rights you have and what rights you have not got before the
Committee.'
Albert Einstein publicly called on all those summoned before
HCUA to refuse to cooperate. In 1948, President Harry Truman
at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and with Condon sitting beside him,
denounced Rep. Thomas and HCUA on the grounds that vital
scientific research 'may be made impossible by the creation of an
235