Not Always A Science

I know nothing about, and want to say nothing about, the Swedish poet who stole the Nobel for Lit from Margaret Atwood.  Okay, he didn't steal it. I note the physicists who won for realizing that the universe is expanding faster.  This 1998 discovery has been joined by others in a fascinating new picture of the vastness of space--an even stranger universe.

But what I want to highlight from Nobel week is the chemistry prize, for Dan Shechtman, an Israeli scientist who discovered new crystalline structure that other scientists thought was impossible.  He was laughed at, fired from the U.S. Bureau of Standards, ostracized.  The evidence mounted, so now quasicrystals not only exist but are manufactured, and as the Nobel committee said, it "eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter."

I highlight this because those of us who are trying to fight off the horrifying resurgence of Dark Ages ignorance are tempted to go to the other extreme and deify science. Sure, we're facing the contempt for science by a frighteningly powerful minority, the refusal to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for the Climate Crisis that may doom civilization completely.  But when battle lines are drawn, us or them, either/or rigidity can lead to equal and opposite errors, like turning science into a religion.

Science and scientists are demonstrably fallible. Even eminent scientists can be prideful and political, just like other academics and politicians.  For instance, this little drama of a new discovery or theory being ridiculed before being lauded is not just a familiar storyline.  It is evidence of human flaws that get repeated in patterns, and can result in great suffering, in wasted years and ruined lives for individuals, and all kinds of bad consequences for others.  Among other things, it discourages new discoveries and creativity in general.

Some scientists know this. Renowned physicist Max Planck admitted that new ideas seldom win over adherents of old ones -- usually a generation must pass while the new idea's "opponents gradually die out ..." English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane pointedly offered "four stages of acceptance" of a scientific idea: 1) this is worthless nonsense, 2) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, 3) this is true, but quite unimportant, 4) I always said so.

Science should be approached with human humility.  A lesson in that for some religions I could mention.