Welcome

Scientific Temper was defined as early as 1898 as " A modest open-minded temper—a temper ever ready to welcome new light, new knowledge, new experiments, even when their results are unfavourable to preconceived opinions and long-cherished theories."

With this attitude, we promote science, enlightenment and the separation of reliable knowledge from fallacies that do not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

Science constantly brings us new and amazing insights and provides the means to improve our lives. At the same time, it is also attacked and belittled. Fake news, non-science and pseudo-science are not always easy to recognise.

We see this tension as a challenge and, at the same time, want to contribute to better science-orientated education at an early stage.

We complement, expand and support science-oriented individuals and organisations with similar goals. These include educational institutions, schools, skeptical organisations, science-oriented NGOs such as WePlanet, and secular and humanist organisations.

Four Central Areas

Scientific Temper will be active in four sometimes overlapping areas:

1. science and critical thinking through events, publications and research,
2. education, through the production of science-based information material and direct teaching,
3. science-based information and studies aimed at a sustainable environment while ensuring human development and well-being,
4. global support for schools that promote science-based education.

The Team

Amardeo Sarma, Managing Director

Amardeo Sarma is an engineer with degrees in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi and TU Darmstadt and has been active in the skeptical movement since the mid-1980s. He co-founded GWUP, ECSO, WePlanet and the SDL Forum Society. He is committed to science and critical thinking and has recently written increasingly about global warming, rational solutions, and countering myths about nuclear energy. He has also written on the Shroud of Turin, the historicity of Jesus, modern agriculture and homoeopathy. He coordinated the GWUP's first dowsing test in 1991, published the results in Skeptiker and clashed with parapsychologists. He co-founded the association Ökomoderne e. V., now a German-speaking section of WePlanet. In 2023, together with two others, he founded the non-profit company Scientific Temper gUG (haftungsbeschränkt), which promotes scientific thinking, education, especially in schools worldwide, and rational solutions to pending problems. Professionally, he has worked in telecommunications, specification languages and security. Amardeo was General Manager at NEC Laboratories GmbH until 2023 and is now Managing Director of Scientific Temper. He has been a member of the SPD for 45 years.

Dr. Manfred Körkel, Director

Manfred Feodor Körkel studied communications engineering at Darmstadt Technical University and one semester of music theory with Johannes Fritsch at the Akademie für Tonkunst. He wrote his doctoral thesis on a mathematical decision problem that is difficult to solve. Feodor has been working with Amardeo Sarma in the sceptic movement since the mid-1980s and is a founding member of the GWUP. He was also fortunate enough to work with James Randi at the GWUP dowsing test in Kassel in 1990. He also dealt with false theories about the Egyptian pyramids. In addition to his scientific interests, he has regularly taken part in musicological conferences since 1978. Feodor is particularly interested in the theoretical foundations of evolutionary cognition und epistemology. Professionally, he has worked in the telecommunications industry on the algorithmic treatment of difficult mathematical optimisation problems. Feodor represents a left-liberal universalist position.

Hans Ajiet Holtkamp, Director

Hans Ajiet Holtkamp is a graduate physicist, has been managing director of disynet GmbH, and co-founder of GWUP, WePlanet DACH. e.V. (formerly Ökomoderne e.V.) and now the Scientific Temper gUG. Since attending Prof. Heinloth's experimental physics lecture in 1984 (Enquete Commission on the Protection of the Earth's Atmosphere of the German Bundestag), he has been trying to draw attention to the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. In 1986, he wrote two articles about climate change for the magazine “Stör-Operator” of the physics student council in Bonn. He became a Party of the Humanists member shortly after its foundation in 2014 to give fact- and evidence-based politics a chance. He was a member of the federal and state executive boards and a candidate for the Party of the Humanists for the North Rhine-Westphalia state association in the 2017 federal election. He was the author/co-author of the party's first position papers on nuclear energy/climate. The universalism and universalistic claim of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are close to his heart.