Bureaucrats Who Block Progress

Jesuis Laplume is the nom de plume of Jim H. White, when he writes on the coming together of science and the philosophy. He was trained as a scientist in an Engineering faculty and spent fifty years helping to move new science into practice, sometimes adding bits to that science where it was needed. He usually took a physical system science role during that process, working with those who were experts in the details, but assuming the roles of the one who looked at the bigger picture, and tried to find the best questions to ask. He found, with few exceptions, that few present experts liked to be told that the science had changed enough that they were going to have to change their ways. Sometimes their responses were vitriolic in nature. He worked in eight different fields of science and engineering and met many of the best in their fields. These were uniformly humble and had a wry sense of humor. They learned, with each success, that there was a great deal more to be learned, but could live with that. After he retired, he started studying spiritual matters, focusing on the philosophy of Religions. He joined a local group, still in operation more than 15 years later, called The Forum on Faith and Science, and studied many more of the books, videos and other communications from the authors studied. This has been a long-standing habit of his.After a string of five heart attacks, over a short span of 3 1/2 years, plus the second of two out-of-body experiences, he took his skeptical attitude up a notch or two and has learned a fair bit about what we do not know, in both science and the philosophy side of what the Ancient Greeks suggested were two sides of the one coin of all knowledge. He also saw that their warning, that philosophy could not be done using the traditional tools of science, was a legitimate one.While he is a great fan of science, he can now see that it, too, has many limitations. No tool should be used outside of its range of usefulness and science-based tools cannot normally be used in philosophy. Quite a number of the books that the Forum studied were by those in science, or philosophy, who were using tools where they were not useful for the chores at hand. This is never a good situation. On both sides, however, a humble application of system-level investigation is useful