I’ve run across this chestnut from NdGT before, but this time it struck me as both untrue and misleading. Of course in a crude sense it’s true. When you get on an airplane, it flies thanks to Bernoulli’s principle whether you believe in or even know of Bernoulli’s principle.
But in a deeper sense it fundamentally misrepresents the nature of science. The good thing about science is not that it’s true–it’s that it’s open to revision. Science’s truths are constantly in flux. As John McPhee said, “science erases what was formerly true.” It’s time to abandon the science cheerleaders’ trope that science is about finding the truth about nature. Every scientific fact ever discovered, every scientific theory ever put forward, is eventually rejected, revised, or limited. The beauty of science isn’t that it’s right–it’s that it can be proven wrong.
The statement is misleading because it is actually more true of religion than science. In his essay “Science and Theology as Art Forms” (Possible Worlds, 1928), JBS Haldane made the point about Christianity, although it holds for certain other religions as well: its gravest problem is its view that it is only true if you believe in it. Hinduism, Buddhism, and many, many others do not hold this view. They hold that their beliefs are true whether you believe in them or not. Karma, for example, just is. It doesn’t matter to a Hindu whether you believe in karma–the wheel will turn on you just the same.
The good thing about good science popularization is that it’s true, period. At a time when science is under fire from fundamentalists, we need to make sure that what we say about rational inquiry into nature is accurate.
