“Science has, in some cases, succumbed to the familiar temptations of political power and fame instead of serving as a force for clarity. Some of the demons haunting today’s world were invented by scientists. And the world is certainly no better off for their release,” writes Michael Crichton. As usual, sharp insights are mixed here with misunderstandings. We need not reject everything or accept everything. We need to untangle it.
Three observations, then.
First, healthy science should resemble religion in one respect. I mean religion as we have known it in modern times, in our own lives and those of our parents. Religion begins with a person’s own faith. That person then approaches religious authorities, who may nurture that faith, if the priest is honest and kind, or complicate it, if the priest is, say, stealing from the faithful. The relationship runs both ways: religious authorities also shape personal faith. Science is similar. Ideally, everyone should learn the basics of the scientific approach well enough to apply it occasionally and to use it to scrutinize scientific authorities. The question should not be whether those authorities are good people, but whether their work meets specific standards of scientific method.
Second, there are media scientists who have generally done little research themselves but have learned to say what people want to hear. You can find such figures across the spectrum, in the mainstream and in alternative circles, and in every field. Some have had two careers: first in ordinary research, then as media scientists.
Third, alongside the media scientists are researchers who are fascinated by their fields and utterly absorbed in them. Their subject interests them so much that they set everything else aside. They simply want to get to the bottom of it. They want to come up with something new. Money and fame matter to them, but rank much lower on their list of priorities. Truly dangerous inventions usually come from this group. Tomáš Očadlík describes this well in an undeservedly overlooked little book about the limited usefulness of science.
It is also important to understand that a major discovery is seldom the work of a lone genius. Only in romantic novels and popular imagination did Nikola Tesla invent something so extraordinary that it would still be revolutionary 130 years later. In reality, science and technology develop as a whole. When the time is ripe for a discovery, someone will make it. Stop one person, and someone else will come up with the same thing.
In a sense, this is an insoluble problem of human existence. Anything we do that helps someone can also turn into a disaster.
These are issues concerning science as a human activity. There are also particular problems we face today in our own civilization: for example, the fact that good science needs much closer contact with manufacturing than it has now, and the question of who sets scientists’ research agendas.