The crime of reason

Written on 7:38 PM by Tushar

Prof. Robert B. Laughlin, Stanford University gets his name in history books (again!) for being the first Nobel Laureate that I have ever seen in flesh! Just kidding…He shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect.

The occasion being the talk he gave at PARC – ‘The crime of reason’

Here’s the abstract of the talk in his words -

“There is increasing talk about the disappearance of technical knowledge from the public domain, both because it is a security danger and because it is economically valuable. I argue that this development is not anomalous at all but a great historic trend tied to our transition to the information age. We are in the process of losing a human right that all of us thought we had but actually didn't - the right to learn things as we can and better ourselves economically from what we learn. Increasingly, figuring out important things (as opposed to unimportant ones) for yourself will become theft and terrorism. Increasingly, reason itself will become a crime.”

Posted in Nobel laureate

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