Science Is Infected

We recently posted about Dr. Durrant, a man who just discovered that one fundamental understanding in chemistry is wrong.

Now, it was no one's "fault" that Lewis was incorrect back in 1916.  He simply did not have all the available information. 

Here is the thing:  Science is simply what we can observe with the tools at hand.  It is foolishness to portray any scientific fact as immutable or inviolate. 

We are still children putting together a giant puzzle.  We do not know how large the puzzle is, nor the subject matter.  We think pieces fit, but they might not.  We will continue to learn and continue to discover complexity and forces and influences that we cannot imagine now.

This is a problem with today's science--it has ceased to be about discovery and is now more about assertion and "rightness".  It has stopped being exploration and has become flag planting and politics.  It was a virgin pursuit tainted by the stain of money and politics.

Consider early explorers looking for trade routes and spice islands.  That is fabulous.  Then consider the early explorers who ceased to look to increase trade (in this case knowledge) and began to take over those islands to deny passage to others, to control the trade (money and politics).  Throw "publish or perish" into the mix and you have a recipe for scientific disaster. 

Does anyone remember the "eat chocolate to lose weight" debacle?  It was a "scientific study" published in "peer reviewed journals" (it really was published in journals it had no business being in).  A couple of years later, the instigator of the fraud announced how false it was and showed how science is being manipulated.

Now, of course, the MSM got a hold of chocolate as a panacea for pudge, but recently, another paper demonstrated that many psychological experiments with "significant results" are actually bunk and unable to be repeated. 

Remember, the greatest minds in the world, true Outliers as smart as we are, used to believe that the world was flat.  They were not stupid men.  Their IQ was as high as any now.  However, they did not have the tools or the perspective to understand.

We must, in science, maintain that humility, that childlike wonder coupled with a thinking man's self doubt and the honesty of an old nun, so that we do not build our castles of knowledge on sand.