Jacob Bronowski: We have to touch people.

[longship]

Some blessed person posted a thread here a little while ago about the 1970's BBC/PBS science series Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" and I had to go back to it. I had watched all these programs when they were first broadcast on PBS in the 70's. I have viewed some of them again, as they were rebroadcast. However, it had been years.

But now I have the entire series on DVD. Watching it again, and again. I've come to some understandings in science in spite of all my education as a physicist and mathematics educator. It is truly the apotheosis of science documentary.

"Bruno" Bronowski was under five feet tall, but to me, he was a true giant. I have more than a couple books by Bronowski, all of them gems. During the war he used his mathematics to solve problems surrounding the Manhattan Project. After the war, like many of his colleagues--including his friend Leo Szilard--he abandoned physics and went into biology. He was an amazingly compassionate person who used his knowledge to further humanity.

Bronowski paints pictures with words of the likes I've not heard from anybody else, not even Carl Sagan. His words are spoken eloquently and with a wonderful precision. The only revelation to his Polish birth is that he rolls the letter "R". A remarkable fact related by the producers of this wonderful gem, related by the show's producers, is how Bronowski never worked from a script, preferring to use his own volumnous stream of consciousness. What's sad about it is the fact that the demands of this production likely ended up killing him. During the production of the Easter Island sequence he had to be as much as carried around due to his feebleness. He passed away shortly after the program received its first airings.

For those science fans, if you've never seen this series, it is compellingly intelligent and insightful, an unforgettable experience.

I'd like to quote the tag lines from episode 11, "Knowledge or Certainty". The episode combines the concepts of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with that of the human element of the science endeavor in a way that only Bronowski could pull off. At the very end of the essay he is standing ankle deep in the pond at Aushwitz into which the ashes of so many lives were flushed. If only the people of this country would have heard, seen, and understood these prophetic words, we might not be in the situation we are now.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".

I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard. I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

emphasis mine

Bronowski squats down and plunges his hand down into the muck in the pond, pulling up a hand full of what must be from the ashes of thousands of dead. The frame freezes and the credits roll over the image. This never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

As Democrats we have a similar mandate. We have to touch people.

[enigmatic]

1. Great post.

K&R.

[longship]

2. Thank you. Should I X-Post to GD?

Just wondering.

[enigmatic]

3. Do it

It needs some sanity right now.