The “P” Word, Thomas Kuhn, and I

 World Federation of Science Journalists

In a way, you can blame it on Thomas Kuhn. It was he who introduced too beautiful and brilliant a term in the early 1960s: paradigm shift. A term that writers of all sorts, particularly about business and information technology, have had no shame abusing since. Myself included. [I can’t help thinking that  if the editors of Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had known that the term would  be such a hit, they would have probably made it the title of the book.]

So I was reminded of my secret guilt about Kuhn’s term late in October, while attending the first conference for Arab science journalists, in Fez, Morocco. In the Q & A that followed a panel on
“Finding Science Stories in the Arab World,” a man in the audience made a comment to this effect: “This sounds to me like all you [Arab science journalists] do is market or publicize Western science and Western paradigms. Unless the departure point in your work is an Arabic and Islamic paradigm of science, he added, your efforts amount to little. 

Saudi Arabia: In Science We Trust

Saudi Arabia shows that it can go a long way in instituting policies that make the kingdom more appealing to Western academia  | IslamOnline.net

Say a Western political leader takes to heart the views of writer Ann Coulter and decides to enact an exceedingly moderate version of her recommendations – that is, to force Saudi Arabia to grant more rights to women and turning Saudi’s single-sex schools into co-ed institutions. What will it take to do this?  Nothing short of a war, and a massive disturbance to an already shaky oil market if the world’s largest producer is put out of business.

Or there is another way: help the Saudis build a university, and they may just willingly do what otherwise only an invasion might force them to.

Petrodollar Science

Can the new research and education initiatives in the Arab Gulf evolve into institutions? The New Atlantis

Oil executives are rarely assigned to establish universities. But when the unlikely call arrives, some hardly pause to ponder the unconventionality of the assignment. So, only five minutes into the meeting that brought him together with leading individuals from Carnegie Mellon University, Nadhmi Al-Nasr, vice president of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco, did not mince his words: “It is perhaps unusual that an oil executive is starting a university. But given your experience in Qatar, would your university be willing to help us build a new research university in Saudi Arabia?”