trouble with science

Every so often history reaches a point where people believe that science has reached its end and no new things are around the corner. Then we are foolishly shown that hey, we never looked around the corner. Look at all that stuff around the bloody corner! Well that's all fine and good, but science has some problems that need to be addressed.

For starters, it lacks discipline. Knowledge that science attains can be collectively stored, studied and repeated without the original questions and designs that that information may have had. Einstein's special theory of relativity for example showed that atomic energy was powerful, but it made no mention of atomic bombs. Science is often so preoccupied with the next great discovery that it doesn't pause to understand the problems that come with it. The Internet gives us communication and accessibility to porn, but it also gives us communication (never get me a crackberry), accessibility to porn, and piracy. Atomic energy gives us tremendous energy supply, but also toxic waste and mushroom clouds. Genetic tailoring is the next wave of said problems, with issues with cloning, disease modification, cheating in athletics (completely undetectably, and already happening). The point is this, science can give us power through knowledge. Power without discipline is worthless. It is a kid in a candy store. A man who learns karate does not kill at will, despite the fact that his training allows him to do so. But science allows anyone with a chemistry and physics background to kill in minutes, as though it was a hideous late-night infomercial for $19.99.

This is only the beginning of my problem with science. The ancient Greeks viewed science as the study of things, the understanding of the nature of the world around us and in so doing, understanding our place in it. We use science as a means to pretend we are above nature and distinct from it. We shelter ourselves from it, presuming our technology and medicines will preserve us, all the while ignoring the fact that nature still dominates. We all still die; we are all still powerless in the face of disasters and viral epidemics.

The major issue I believe I have with science is that it focuses too much on the trees. The forest, the big picture often shows that a lot of little things are interacting, changing and affecting each other. We can't study each little thing unless we understand this. That's why computer models of weather have so many variables and permutations, and are quite often wrong. Weather, like human interactions, has so many variables, so many things going on at any given moment that it can't be studied scientifically in the old way. Each variable cannot be isolated with any certainty in the real world. It has to interact before it can be studied. It is a living system. Science is terrible with these. Psychology is a perfect example. Scientific study often looks for simple and quick formulas for explanation. But what I saw in psychology was that these simple formulas did not work in total and conflicted often totally. It was the general formulas which took in the varying parts interacting that seemed to have more success at explaining our behavior and outlook, but may have failed to explain very specific circumstances. A living system relies on these interactions fueling change and innovation to defeat the natural tendency to breakdown. What science seeks however is uniformity. It seeks replicants and verifiability. It won't find any. It can create them where there are none, thus why efficiency reigns in corporate industry and everyone is thus the same from any usable standpoint. Public education at work, crafting molds of uniform standards.. ...

I'm not saying its useless, but it shouldn't be a reliance on generating more scientists or mathematicians in our society. We need more thinkers. Generalists to keep the scientists in line, focused on the science instead of the credit.