Science has had a long and difficult path to its success, and to its well deserved respect over its main competitors: superstition and falsehood. Arguably, in 1945, that respect reached its zenith, with the detonation of the nuclear weapons that are credited with ending World War 2. Science-based technology literally exploded onto the public consciousness. No one could argue with its awesome demonstration of power. Nor could anyone doubt that the predictions of scientists, no matter how fantastic, must eventually come true. Why, by 1966, we will all have flying cars!
Of course, we did not. That is certainly
forgivable, but scientific technology has fallen short of public
expectations in more ways than just that. Some years ago, an eminent
physicist published a commentary lamenting the transformation of science
from an evidence-based endeavor into a proposal-based activity
— a guessing game. Instead of observation, hypothesis, and experiment,
physics seemed to have moved its laboratories to the blackboard. We
are all familiar with the confusing maze of cryptic, Greco-Arabic symbols that
describe for us such unproved pronouncements as the existence of
multiple universes, subatomic strings, and "dark" physics, for none of
which there is direct physical evidence. Yet these educated guesses
enjoy a degree of acceptance rivaling that of confirmed experimental
results, blurring the line between scientific fact and speculative
conjecture.........To Read More....
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