Blasts from the past

Digging deep into some of my old notes, I came across this obituary of John Ziman written by Jerry Ravetz. I know both through their written work and was lucky enough to meet and chat briefly with John Ziman not long before he died. Ziman’s book “Real Science” is for me the classic account of what has happened to science as it moved from a ‘way of life’ to a job.

Jerry Ravetz writes:

I first became aware of him through his 1960 radio talk Scientists – Gentlemen Or Players?, where he observed how a career in science was starting to change, from being a vocation to being a job.

There was a paradox running through his later career, to which he must have been sensitive. He was a “Renaissance man” in a way highly desirable for a scientist, but he did not exert the influence that he might have hoped to. This was due less to the passion he deployed in argument than the times in which he found himself. The age of such eminent scientist-savants as JBS Haldane, JD Bernal and Joseph Needham was passing, while a new generation of socially responsible scientists had yet to establish itself. Those who reminded scientists of their social responsibilities were viewed with suspicion; and those who had stopped doing research were treated as defectors.

Obituary: John Ziman | Education | The Guardian

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