《Ivory Tower 》作者：- Bruce Sterling【EPUB】

zaq

Ivory Tower BRUCE STERLING From Hartwell David - Years Best SF 11 2006 Bruce Sterling www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/ lives in Belgrade Serbia with his wifeSerbianauthor and filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic. He has recently reinvented himself as a futuristand?? design critic publishing Shaping Things 2005 a book about created objects as aMedia-workspamphlet through MIT press. One of the chief architects of cyberpunk sciencefiction he has?? published ten novels and three story collections to date. ThroughoutSterlings career part of his project has been to put us in touch with the larger world inwhich we live giving us glimpses of not only speculative and fantastic realities but also thebedrock of politics in human behavior. Ivory Tower was published in Nature. It is a full scale attack on scientism using deadpanhumor. Following Jonathan Swift see the Mclntyre story earlier in his attack on the RoyalSociety the premier body of scientists of his day in the flying island of Laputa section of Gullivers Travels Sterling mounts his own attack: 10000 self-educated physicists form acommune. Our problem was simple. We needed an academy but professional careers in conventional sciencewere out of the question for us. We were 10000 physicists entirely self-educated on theInternet. Frankly physics is a lot easier to learn than physicists used to let on. The ultimate size ofthe smallest particles the origin and fate of the Universe—come on who could fail to take aburning interest in those subjects If we were genuinely civilized thats all we would talkabout. In the new world of open access ultrawide broadband and gigantic storage banks physicsis just sort of sitting there. Its like a vast intellectual Tinkertoy We cranky net-geeks hadto find a way to devote every waking moment to our overpowering lust for physics. Of course wedemanded state support for our research efforts just like real scientists do but alas thebureaucrats wouldnt give us the time of day. So to find time for our kind of science we had to dump a few shibboleths. For instance wenever bother to publish: we just post our findings on weblogs and if they get a lot oflinks hey were the Most Frequently Cited. Tenure Who needs that Never heard of itDoctorates degrees defending a??thesis—dont know dont need em cant even be bothered Organizing ourselves was a snap. If you are a math genius whose primary language is Malayalamand??whose main enthusiasm is wave-particle duality you stand out on the net like a buzzinghornet in a spiderweb. Youre one in a million pal—but in a world of ten billion peopletheres 10000 of us. We immediately started swapping