This weekend I read two more Rob Sawyer books. He is a Canadian Hugo award winning SF author. His books fall under the "Candy Book" category (easy and quick to read but still has plenty of thought calories). Frequently he invites interesting philosophical points in his books.
For example, in the first Sawyer book I read, "Rollback" two characters discuss why investing in the far future rarely works (e.g. stopping "global warming"). One character proposes that we share about the same genetic material with our descendants 100 years from now (about 1/32nd) as we would a 3rd cousin once removed. And just as we wouldn't go to great strides and spend all sorts of money to bail out that distant relative, a similar argument could be made for our descendants.
Anyway, I am off topic.
This candy book discussed something fairly close to my heart. As some of you may know, I had a bit of a crisis of faith in March of this year. I am not referring to a religious or spiritual crisis but rather, I seem to have lost my faith in science (as it is practiced today). After near two decades of education building up the scientific method and experimentation as the gold standard for discovering universal truths, I no longer believe these two tools are as useful as once thought. In the times of Newton (and well into the early 20th century probably until post-Manhattan Project), nearly any scientific experiment could be reproduced by an interested individual (or small group of individuals) with a moderate (but potentially affordable) investment of time and money. Without the safeguard of reproducibility the scientific messages and in few ways different from religious dogma.
This 2nd book by Sawyer, also touches on similar themes about the frailty of the scientific method. More interestingly however, after reading two books by then same author one gets an idea of what he holds near in dear to his heart.
