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Science is the religion of the suburbs (W B Yeats)

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Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five (Arthur Koestler)

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The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life ())Koestler again)...

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life (Godfrey Hardy)

Why science isn't as clever as it thinks it is

These days, there's loads of stuff on the telly about science.  All of it tells us how great science is.  Hmm...

Where, though, are the telly programmes dedicated to the failures of science?  Are we afraid to examine these?  Here are a few:

Aether theory - judged by the bestest scientist of the time (Maxwell) to be the best-confirmed scientific theory ever - turns out to be rubbish;

Humorial medicine, alchemy, crystalline spheres, the list (according to Larry Laudan) is endless.  Granted, we have science itself to thank for showing such theories to be rubbish, but how are we to know that what they were replaced with is any more credible?  So Newton shows Galileo to be wrong, Einstein shows Newton to be wrong and so on.   Quantum mechanics seems to indicate that stuff can be in more than one place at a time, and that ought not be possible, unless light-speed travel is possible, and according to Einstein it isn't.  Now maybe scientists can argue that scientific theories are only approximately right and get 'righter' as time goes on, but there are some cases of science just getting it completely wrong.

Anecdotally, we read one day that red wine is good for us, the next that it isn't.  The day after, it's back in favour, and so on.  

The message from MG is this:  Don't make science your God - this god is capricious!