Relics of Science History For Sale At Christie's 142
circletimessquare writes "Dennis Overbye at the New York Times has some ruminations on some of the historical totems of science going up for auction at Christie's next week. There is the 1543 copy of 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' by Copernicus, which you can have for $900,000 to $1.2 million. If you have some cash left over, maybe you can pick up an original work by Galileo, Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Freud, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, or Malthus. And then there is the 1878 copy of the world's first phone book: 'a shock of recognition — that people were already talking on the phone a year before Einstein was born. In fact, just two years later Einstein's father went into the nascent business himself. Einstein grew up among the rudiments of phones and other electrical devices like magnets and coils, from which he drew part of the inspiration for relativity. It would not be until 1897, after people had already made fortunes exploiting electricity, that the English scientist J. J. Thomson discovered what it actually was ...'"
Re:If Freud Was a Scientist, Fire Up My Crack Pipe (Score:4, Interesting)
Other than that, I agree, Freud should not be on a list of scientists.
Then again, Tycho Brahe took Copernicus' heliocentric model and tried to revert us back to a geocentric model to appease the church, so I don't think he deserves the title either.
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No, I'm not wearing anything Alumini?um (Score:3, Interesting)
scratch that, even if he/she doesn't call it a fake but just burns it out of spite, can anybody keep this from happening ?
Isn't there a 'Library of humanity' (sponsored by us all) to which pieces like this should go ?
Re:Ugh... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If Freud Was a Scientist, Fire Up My Crack Pipe (Score:1, Interesting)
What are some of those things that Freud got right? The Unconcious, or the discovery that oftentimes people mean something other than what they appear to be saying. You can criticize him for a clumsy ontology, BUT his thinking about how the mind works did evolve over the years. It's not exactly correct to speak of "the Freudian conception of mind or of the Unconcious". He developed and discarded more than a couple of models.
The talking cure? It sure beats the hell out of cold water treatments, deprivations of food and sleep, and god only knows what "cures" some of the Victorians came up with. The talking cure is taken today as self-evident. But it wasn't always that way.
If we judge Freudian psycho-analysis by current expectations, experiences, and understandings of how the brain projects and makes personality manifest, then yeah, sure he was the worst kind of charlatan. How else, then, could millions of otherwise intelligent people have been so very easily hoodwinked?
However, it should also be kept in mind that is a horribly mean-spirited way of treating any thinker. If nothing else, this shows an appalling lack of imagination and capacity for understanding other human beings. "He does not talk like us, therefore he must be wrong,horribly wrong on all points, in general and in particular."
The value of Freud lies in the simple fact that oftentimes his errors are not so very simple That is assuming, the effort is made to grasp what he wrote, and not simply rely on what "everyone knows to be true" about Freud and psycho-analysis.
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