The death knell of that kind of thinking and logic (called traditional) was sounded on Nov. 18, 1660 when Mr. Wren gave a lecture to Lord Brouncker, Robert Boyle (Boyle's Law), Mr. Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paul Neile, Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Goddard, Dr. Petty, Mr. Ball, and Mr. Hill at Oxford University. The following year, with addition members to the group, it was called the Royal Society, but the formal royal charter wasn't issued until 1663, and about that time Robert Hook (Hooke's Law) became one of two 'curators of experiments'. Issac Newton didn't join until Dec. 22, 1671. I will here give my own interpretation modus operandi of the Royal Society. Don't speculate, go out and observe carefully, collect facts and try to systematize them.

The speculative method of determining the number of teeth in a horse's mouth hadn't worked. One needed a horse. Speculation about how many Angels can dance on the head of a pin will probably continue until we have a better supply of Angels. [I think the 1990's will be called the decade of the 'Great Angel Hysteria', but it hasn't produced a single bona fide Angel, so we can't even clone enough for the experiment, and the question remains unanswered to the best of my knowledge.]

C. P. Snow (a scientist) wrote a book in 1959 pointing out the great gap between the literary intellectuals and scientists, noting it was the literati who named themselves as the only intellectuals, leaving out Edwin Hubble, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.

Snow suggested in 'The Two Cultures', 1963, that a 'third culture' would arise that would bridge the gap between the literati and the scientists. This is far from realization as yet. Norm Cohen, who commented on 'The Origins of John Henry' in a recent thread, bridged that gap. However, scientists didn't know he was a world class researcher in folklore, and folklorists didn't know we was a world class scientist.

In the second sentence of the Introduction of 'The Third Culture' p. 17, 1995, John Brockman wrote 'In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized.'

The reason is simple. The speculative approach has led to very few advances in human progress. The steam engine, electricity, telephone, automobile, modern medicine aren't from literati.

[The gap was almost bridged in the late 18th century when Ann Home married John Hunter. She wrote the now lesser known 'The Flowers of the Forest' that's in the 1st volume of 'The Scots Musical Museum' in 1772, shortly before her marriage. Her song of c 1782, "Alknomook, or the Death Song of the Cherokee Chiefs" has been collected at least in Michigan and Virginia, as a traditional song. While she entertained the likes of Handel (who composed a tune for her "My mother bids me bind my hair") in the drawing room, her husband, sometimes with her father, were busy in a backyard labratory dissecting corpses. John Hunter is known as the father of modern surgery. John's brother, William, wasn't a researcher, but he was a good doctor and made a lot of money. He used it to buy old manuscripts. His collection, now the Hunterian Collection of MSS at Glasgow University Library is one of the best collections of renaissance MSS that there is, anywhere. In these we find the early versions of many folktales that are still around.]

I never saw the first laser, but two months after it first worked I saw the 2nd one work. This was not the work of literati. One of my high school friends, J.T.R., no literati, figured out a way to use one (his wife is a chemist and viola player). He didn't like the way that phono needles ruined his recordings. He figured out how to use a laser to read and write on a plastic disk, and got it to work in 1965. It's called a compact disk, and he has somewhere around 30 patents on it, all of the basic ones. He doesn't work alone anymore. He figured out the basics of a system with no moving parts, and formed his own company to develop it. Last year Microsoft invested heavily in it, and they are now expanding the research and support staff and looking for a bigger building.

Nathan Kappani wrote many papers on optical fibers, which practically nobody read, until small solid state lasers were developed, and then, boom, many thousands of messages could be sent simultaneously over a single fiber. Kappani wasn't a literati, but his English was excellent, although not his native language

Speculative thinking just doesn't work very well. The results are usually proven wrong, although it sometimes it takes a while to do this. We just can't predict very well. Something totally unexpected usually happens to shake us out of our fondest beliefs. Homo Sapiens isn't as sapiens as he would like to believe.

'Why' questions always have a near infinity of answers, and no one knows any way of figuring out which answer is 'right'. It's 'how' questions that lead to positive results. ['Why' did the chicken cross the road? I have no idea; I've never been able to communicate very well with any chicken that I've known. 'How' did the chicken cross the road. Many that I've noted didn't make it across; they aren't very smart (the sky is falling, the sky is falling); they walked until it was too late. Chickens are not totally flightless, I've seen them fly to about 5 1/2 feet high, but don't remember how far they could go. I wasn't a chicken rancher for very long, and really didn't enjoy chopping off their heads. It used to be popular to say don't be a turkey, soar with the eagles, but a bird brain is a bird brain, regardless of the body it's in.]

Back to 'right'. Here I'm at a handicap because there is really no precise definition of right, correct, perfect, fact, or truth. They are just theoretical concepts that prove handy in many situtations, but we don't know for certain if any of them really exist. This is somewhat akin to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics (reciprocal speading in elecronics is really the same thing, and very important in the design of the circuitry that allows you to read this). We can narrow down the size of a box, in which they must be found, to some extent, but we can't give a precise statement of exactly where they are.

The real question is 'how', not 'why'. Quite simple, really.