The Canon Read Free Page A

their mothers and grandmothers and great-uncle Milton always said it was true. Or they will redefine 'early morning' to mean anything from midnight until lunchtime. And, by gosh, it's true: many earthquakes that occur, occur between twelve A.M. and twelve P.M. Uncle Milton was right!"
    The public also believes that seismologists are much better at predicting earthquakes than they claim, but that they perversely keep their prognostications to themselves because they don't want to "stir a panic."
    "I got a letter from a woman saying, 'I know you can't tell me when the next earthquake is going to be,'" Jones said, "'but will you tell me when your children go to visit out-of-town relatives?' She assumed I'd
quietly use my insider's knowledge on behalf of my own family, while denying it to everybody else. People would rather believe the authorities were lying to them than to accept the uncertainty of the science." With a minimum of scientific training, Jones said, people would realize that the words "science" and "uncertainty" deserve linkage in a dictionary and that the only reason she would send her children to visit out-of-town relatives would be to visit out-of-town relatives.
    Many scientists also argue that members of the laity should have a better understanding of science so they appreciate how important the scientific enterprise is to our nation's economic, cultural, medical, and military future. Our world is fast becoming a technical Amazonia, they say, a pitiless panhemispheric habitat in which being on a first-name basis with scientific and technical principles may soon prove essential to one's socioeconomic survival. "Soon after the Industrial Revolution, we in the West reached a point where reading was a fundamental process of human communication," Lucy Jones said. "If you couldn't read, you couldn't participate in ordinary human discourse, let alone get a decent job.
    "We're going through another transformation in expectations right now," she continued, "where reasoning skills and a grasp of the scientific process are becoming things that everybody needs."
    Scientists are hardly alone in their conviction that America's scientific eminence is one of our greatest sources of strength. Science and engineering have given us the integrated circuit, the Internet, protease inhibitors, statins, spray-on Pam (it works for squeaky hinges, too!), Velcro, Viagra, glow-in-the-dark slime, a childhood vaccine syllabus that has left slacker students with no better excuse for not coming to class than a "persistent Harry Potter headache," computer devices named after fruits or fruit parts, and advanced weapons systems named after stinging arthropods or Native American tribes.
    Yet the future of our scientific eminence depends not so much on any cleverness in applied science as on a willingness to support basic research, the pi-in-the-sky investigations that may take decades to yield publishable results, marketable goodies, employable graduate students. Scientists and their boosters propose that if the public were more versed in the subtleties of science, it would gladly support generous annual increases in the federal science budget; long-term, open-ended research grants; and sufficient investment in infrastructure, especially better laboratory snack machines. They would recognize that the basic researchers of today help generate the prosperity of tomorrow, not to mention elucidating the mysteries of life and the universe, and that you
can't put a price tag on genius and serendipity, except to say it's much bigger than Congress's science allotment for the current fiscal year.
    Yes, let's cosset the scientists of today and let's home-grow the dreamers of tomorrow, the next generation of scientists. For by fostering a more science-friendly atmosphere, surely we would encourage more young people to pursue science careers, and keep us in fighting trim against the ambitious and far more populous upstarts India and China. We need more