|
The question of how much respect we should give to someone who has major achievements in some area of science or technology, who nonetheless did great evil, or who took all credit for work that substantially involved someone else, or who (hypothetically) was something of a sleazebag , or (hypothetically) engaged in some form of behaviour that was hurtful or injurious to those around him/her, is an important one.
In my view, looking overall at the entire history of science and technology, there are plenty of cases of 'bad' or even 'very bad' or even 'evil' characters, who actually achieved a lot.
The poster boy for this type of person is arguably Wernher von Braun, who aside from helping the Nazis develop the V1 and V2 weapons, knowingly used forced labour to help build these weapons;
and it was not just the 'you will do this!' type of forced labor; they systematically fed the working prisoners less than they should have, knowing that each prisoner would inevitably die of starvation and overwork after a certain specified period of time. (thus using a human being as an expendable machine)
On the other side of the ledger, as we all know, von Braun was a brilliant engineer, leader of men, inspiration for space exploration, and a superb popularizer and explainer of science and technology.
cheers
Robert
The question of what exactly Hubble did or did not discover, is, I think, a very serious one; given that we have named a space telescope after him, named a physical constant after him, and we even talk of the expansion of the universe as being 'The Hubble Flow'
|