Time for a good, old-fashioned Livejournal poll

[secritcrush]

I'm not sure I'm going to get on with The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixan. I started reading it this morning and I'm already frustrated with it.

Poll Pretend you are a scientist dayIn chapter 5 of TBP, "A game of pool" two scientists (one applied and one theoretical) do some rudimentary experiments where they move a pool table around and sink the eight ball with the cue ball and as

Comments

[purplecthulhu]

Speaking as a Real Scientist (™) I'd think those results were fantastic, that they were telling us we didn't know everything and that physics was going to change. That's a huge opportunity for a scientist. New things are going to happen! You don't kill yourself, you stay up late and do more experiments! It's exciting!

If you think science is a religion and you have to Believe Everything Is This Way, then when you find it isn't then you might commit suicide. But that's not what science is - whether in China or England - so this doesn't work at all.

[asyouknow_bob]

Yeah, I had trouble with that as well.
(It gets worse, with the Leica that inexplicably starts doing magical countdown-imprinitng.)

I'm very tentatively hypothesizing that we're seeing some sort of cultural difference between the scientists of my acquaintance and the sort of scientists that China selects for?

Because otherwise, yeah, either their reaction makes no sense at all, OR they've looked more deeply into the abyss than the author has actually shown us.