I’d like to thank everyone for their comments in this discussion, I am finding it very interesting food for thought.
James, It still seems that you’re conflating science as an endeavor and science as a popular conception. I’m going to avoid, as much as possible, getting too deeply into specific examples, because I think those will tend to take us off topic; as I read it, this thread isn’t really about Special Relativity or Einstein, but about the broader issues surrounding science that have come up in threads that were.
I don’t think there can be any question that science as an endeavor is working, perhaps not perfectly, but to the extent that we are continuing to produce new information about the world, and that that information is confirmed over and over again by the vast practical implications of the developments. Computer technology keeps shrinking and speeding up, extra-solar space exploration is expanding rapidly, new medical technologies are saving more lives for less money than ever before. It’s hard to summarize all the complexity subsumed under “the pace of knowledge creation”, but we can certainly say that it is non-zero, and that it is due far more to science than to religion.
The problem is that the frontiers of science are more specialized than ever before. A timely example is the recent supposed proof of the P=NP problem, one of the more important and intractable problems in computer science (the proof was rejected as flawed). Though it was covered somewhat by non-technical media, it is difficult to explain what exactly the proof tried to show to someone without a solid foundation in set theory and complexity theory, let alone explaining how the proof worked or why a lay person should care. This is a more and more common occurrence in science: questions that are not merely hard to answer, they are very hard to even ask.
Popularizers of science attempting to bridge the gap between these highly specialized fields and the rest of the population have a very difficult problem, and few have been very successful. Hawking does real science, for example predicting Hawking radiation from quantum theory, and he also writes popular summaries of scientific understanding, such as A Brief History of Time. The latter are not peer-reviewed (or rather, not officially so), because they are not intended to prove anything. They are intended to take arcane concepts used in theoretical physics and make them accessible to people who are not familiar with theoretical physics.
Thus, it becomes a problem of losing precision in translation. The harm this causes does not require any sinister intent to be predicted and understood. Even without anything being “done to disrupt intelligence” (my emphasis), intelligence is disrupted when well-meaning scientists translate precise mathematical facts (or what have you) into easily-understandable-but-significantly-less-precise, non-technical language. The result is very similar to poetry, which tries to capture highly complex ideas in simple terms, and like all poetry it is vulnerable to interpretation.
So, we have two competing explanation (again, assuming I’m reading your position correctly):
-On the one hand, we have well-meaning popularizers who inadvertently mislead, and a naive populace that takes their interpretation of those facts as gospel, leading to misguided reverence and bull-headed acceptance of the science as they understand it.
-On the other hand, we have sinister or selfish individuals within the scientific (and possibly political, media, etc.) community intentionally misleading the same naive populace, with the same result.
I think there are good reasons to prefer the former scenario. It accounts for continuing progress in understanding and controlling our world while also recognizing that science is misleading some of the population, but it does so without wading into the “conspiracy theorist” criticism that Farsight cautions against. And that criticism is good to avoid not only because it can be used to dismiss your argument. Because of the size and diversity of interests represented in the scientific community, even among popularizers and evangelists of science, it would require an extremely great amount of evidence to prove intentional misrepresentation. Given an explanation that accounts for observations without appeal to anything resembling a conspiracy (which I think I am providing), we should prefer it because the burden of proof will be significantly reduced.
Farsight, I’m curious what your experiences were on physicsforums (both as a science buff and as a forum admin:). If you’re comfortable sharing, what were the circumstances of your banning there? From what I’ve seen of you here, you are respectful and well spoken, and have interesting things to say on the subjects that concern you. It would speak very poorly of a supposedly scientific community to forcibly remove someone simply for deigning to disagree.