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Finding Enlightenment in Scotland In the 1740s, the famous French philosophy Voltaire said "We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization." That’s not a bad advertisement for any country, especially when it comes to attracting people in search of a first class education. Yet some people go even further than that. According to the American author Arthur Herman, the Scots invented the modem world itself. He argues that Scottish thinkers and intellectuals worked out many of the most important ideas on which modem life depend everything from the scientific method to market economics. Their ideas did not just spread amongst intellectuals, but to those people in business, government and the sciences who actually shaped the Western world. It all started during the period that historians call the Scottish Enlightenment, which is usually seen as taking place between the years 1740 and 1800. At this time, Scotland was home to a number of thinkers who made an important shift in the course of Western philosophy. Before that, philosophy was mainly concerned with religion. For the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, the proper study of humanity was mankind itself. Their reasoning was practical. For the philosopher David Hume, humanity was the right subject for philosophy because we can examine human behavior and so find real evidence of how people think and feel. And from that we can make judgments about the societies we live in and make concrete suggestions about how they can be improved, for universal benefit. Hume was not a scientist himself, but his enquiry into the nature of knowledge laid the foundations for the scientific method the pursuit of truth through experiment. His friend and fellow resident of Edinburgh, Adam Smith, famously applied the study of mankind to the ways in which mankind does business. Trade, he argued, was a form of information. Money is the way in which people tell each other what they want, and how much people pay is the best way we have of knowing how much somebody wants something. In pursuing our own interests through trading in markets, we all come to benefit each other. Smith’s idea of "enlightened self-interest" has come to dominate modem views of economics. It also has wider applications. He was one of the first major philosophers to point out that nations can become rich, free and powerful more efficiently through peace, trade and invention than by means of war and plunder. The original Scottish Enlightenment is thought to have ended with the lives of Smith, Hume and the other thinkers who lived in Scotland at that time. But a wider Scottish Enlightenment can still be seen. It exists in the way that the ideas evolved at that time still underpin our theories. It also exists in Scotland itself in an educational tradition that combines academic excellence with practical orientation. The Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI) is a good example. Founded in 1998 by a group of four Scottish universities, ISLI draws on the academic expertise of the university departments of computer science, electronic and electrical engineering and informatics, But though it works at the cutting edge of science, ISLI’s ultimate aims are rooted in the needs of the real world: to produce highly skilled design engineers and researchers to meet the needs of the rapidly changing global semiconductor industry. Though only one amongst many educational institutions in Scotland, ISLI’s existence shows that the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment still live on. It’s a country that’s still inventing, still modernizing, and still doing its best to spread enlightenment. Scotland is thought to have made important contributions to the civilization of the Western world because of______.
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Study Helps Predict Big Mediterranean Quake Scientists have found evidence that an overlooked fault in the eastern Mediterranean is likely to produce an earthquake and tsunami every 800 years as powerful as the one that destroyed Alexandria in AD 365. Using radiocarbon dating techniques, simulations and computer models, the researchers recreated the ancient disaster in order to identify the responsible fault. "We are saying there is probably a repeat time of 800 years for this kind of earthquake," said Ms. Beth Shaw, an earthquake scientist at the University of Cambridge, who led the study. Scientists study past earthquakes in order to determine the future possibility of similar large shocks. Identifying the fault for the AD 365 earthquake and tsunami is important for the tens of millions of people in the region, Ms. Shaw said. The fault close to the southwest coast of Crete last produced a big enough quake to generate a tsunami about 1300, which means the next powerful one could come in the next 100 years, she added in a telephone interview. Ms. Shaw and her colleagues calculate the likely intervals by measuring the motion of either side of the fault to find how often such large earthquakes would have to occur to account for that level of motion, she said. Their computer model suggested an 8 magnitude quake on the fault would produce a tsunami that floods the coastal regions of Alexandria and North Africa, the southern coast of Greece and Sicily all the way up the Adriati to Dubrovnik. This would be similar to the ancient quake in AD 365 that caused widespread destruction in much of Greece and unleashed a tsunami that flooded Alexandria and the Nile Delta, likely killing tens of thousands of people, she said. Radiocarbon dating techniques can be used to identify the age of the earth.
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