In his recent New York Review of Books piece on Margaret Wertheim’s Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything, Freeman Dyson offers:Īll of science is uncertain and subject to revision. One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. In a letter to Hans Mühsam dated July 9th, 1951, an elderly Albert Einstein observed: Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature, it’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match.Ĭarl Sagan echoed the same sentiment when he remarked: Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. Isaac Asimov knew this when he appeared on the Bill Moyers show in 1988 and shared some timeless, remarkably timely insights on creativity in science and education: It proceeds in fits and starts of ignorance. Real science is a revision in progress, always. Stuart Firestein writes in the excellent Ignorance: How It Drives Science: Gathered here are several eloquent definitions that focus on science as process rather than product, whose conduit is curiosity rather than certainty.
So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? It seems like a simple question, but it’s an infinitely complex one, the answer to which is ever elusive and contentious. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.” Little seems to have changed in the nearly two decades since, and although the government is now actively encouraging “citizen science,” for many “citizens” the understanding of - let alone any agreement about - what science is and does remains meager. “We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology,” Carl Sagan famously quipped in 1994, “and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.
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