Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
spoken language, they will find a way to communicate. Science
itself is a transnational language. Scientists are naturally cosmopolitan
in attitude and are more likely to see through efforts to
divide the human family into many small and warring factions.
'There is no national science,' said the Russian playwright Anton
Chekhov, 'just as there is no national multiplication table.'
(Likewise, for many, there is no such thing as a national religion,
although the religion of nationalism has millions of adherents.)
In disproportionate numbers, scientists are found in the ranks
of social critics (or, less charitably, 'dissidents'), challenging the
policies and myths of their own nations. The heroic names of the
physicists Andrei Sakharov* in the former USSR, Albert Einstein
and Leo Szilard in the United States, and Fang Li-zhu in China
spring readily enough to mind, the first and last risking their lives.
Especially in the aftermath of the invention of nuclear weapons,
scientists have been portrayed as ethical cretins. This is an
injustice, considering all those who, sometimes at considerable
personal peril, have spoken out against their own countries'
misapplications of science and technology.
For example, the chemist Linus Pauling (1901-94) was, more
than any other person, responsible for the Limited Test Ban
Treaty of 1963, which halted above-ground explosions of nuclear
weapons by the United States, the Soviet Union and the United
Kingdom. He mounted a blistering campaign of moral outrage
and scientific data, made more credible by the fact that he was a
Nobel laureate. In the American press, he was generally vilified
for his troubles, and in the 1950s the State Department cancelled
his passport because he had been insufficiently anti-communist.
His Nobel Prize was awarded for the application of quantum
mechanical insights - resonances, and what is called hybridization
* As a much-decorated 'Hero' of the Soviet Union, and privy to its nuclear
secrets, Sakharov in the Cold War year 1968 boldly wrote - in a book published
in the West and widely distributed in samizdat in the USSR - 'Freedom of
thought is the only guarantee against an infection of peoples by the mass myths,
which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demogogues, can be
transformed into bloody dictatorships.' He was thinking of both East and West.
I would add that free thought is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for
democracy.
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