Brian Gill: A science career in three shocks

Initial delight and optimism with a science vocation hit turbulence as the decades unfolded.

The first shock was pleasant.  In the 1970s, after finishing secondary school in a small country town, I moved to Palmerston North to start a science degree.  Massey University's huge science blocks were monumental.  I was awe-struck by the number and size of the lecture halls and laboratories.  The dozens of white-coated science lecturers, so knowledgeable in their specialised fields, were inspiring.  It seemed a cutting edge where sceptical enquiry, evidence and objectivity were providing new scientific understanding.  I wanted to join in.

David Lillis and Peter Schwerdtfeger: The Mātauranga Māori – Science Debate

The Recent Controversy

A letter to the Listener, signed by seven internationally-renowned University of Auckland professors in July 2021, sparked a heated public controversy that has become increasingly vindictive. Several media articles have discussed the letter and reactions to it at length and we do not wish to duplicate their perspectives here. However, we do wish to present what we consider to be a balanced view of the critical issues and present a position that defends the integrity of science while accepting the value of indigenous knowledge.

Martin Hanson: Science, Knowledge, and Myth - The New Priesthood

"We condemn thee, Michael Servetus, to be bound, and led to the place of Champel, there to be fastened to a stake and burnt alive, together with thy book, as well the one written by thy hand as the printed one, even till thy body be reduced to ashes; and thus shalt thou finish thy days to furnish an example to others who might wish to commit the like.”

Thus, in October 1553 Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva for heresy at the behest of Protestant John Calvin (surprisingly, not the Catholic Church, but they were just as keen to see him burn).

His crime? Having the impudence to contradict the teachings of the Church. In addition to calling the Trinity “a  three-headed monster, he had the temerity to show that Galen, a Second Century physician, had been wrong. Galen had taught that blood passed directly from the right to the left side of the heart through invisible pores, but so great had Galen’s authority been that his teachings had become sclerified as religious dogma for the next three quarters of a millennium.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Science is a process rather than a product

The tools used by astrologers appear daunting to the uninitiated – all those tables with weird symbols all over the place, the intricate calculations, the dazzling horoscopes with all their esoteric paraphernalia; this surely is science at work.

In some ways, it is. Ephemeris data have been lifted from NASA databanks. Spheroidal geometry underpins the Tables of Houses. The stuff of science is certainly there. Indeed there was a time when astrology provided an overarching conceptual framework for much of what was then science. Chaucer tells us that the 14^th century physician ‘kept his patients from the pall through horoscopes and magick natural’ (modernised paraphrase). So what changed?