Scientific Consensus


Some scientific ideas are so easily grasped that they are easily explained to the general public.  Other ideas can only be fully understood after a minimum level of training and studies in the relevant area.  A few ideas are so obscure, so far removed from everyday experience that only a very few specialists fully understand the topic.

Science is a landscape in which anyone may wander.  How pleasant to sit in the green pastures of accumulated knowledge and dip the fingers in a stream of certainty.  But how much more exciting it is to scuba-dive through flooded caves in search of the foundations of science: how much more satisfying it is to climb the highest peak and see the bigger picture.

A science historian at The University of Manchester says he has cracked 'The Plato Code', secret messages purported to be hidden in the writings of history's most famous philosopher.

Plato likely needs no introduction here but, in brief, he was one of the most influential authors in history; philosopher, mathematician and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the West, which laid the foundations of both Western philosophy and science.