http://www.drudgereport.com/irak.jpg

hahaha

I know what you’re getting at, though. It’s the whole “Newton was right until Einstein showed he was wrong” thing. There’s an amazingly influential essay/book that I think you should read. It’s called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn (this is the guy who brought the concept of scientific paradigms to the forefront, a concept that you, as a former pupil of Mr. Butler, should immediately recognize). Kuhn is an historian of science, and his book argues that a major revolution in science (as in the Einstein one mentioned above)…:

necessitates the [scientific] community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. Each [revolution] produced a consequent shift in the problems available for scientific scrutiny and in the standards by which the profession determined what should count as an admissable problem or as a legitimate problem-solution. And each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world within which scientific work was done. Such changes, together with the controversies that almost always accompany them, are the defining characteristics of scientific revolutions. (p. 6)

Basically, Kuhn argues that scientific communities operate within specific paradigms, and that revolutions occur when a scientist comes along who operates outside of the accepted paradigm and who can offer experimental evidence to support the rationalization of that paradigm. It’s not that the former scientists were wrong as much as they were misguided by their paradigm.

Or something to that effect (I’ve only read selections from the book, not the whole thing).

One more quote, I think, will help clarify his argument: “[The] need to change the meaning of established and familiar concepts is central to the revolutionary impact of Einstein’s theory. Though subtler than the changes from geocentrism to heliocentrism, from phlogiston to oxygen, or from corpuscles to waves, the resulting conceptual transformation is no less decisively destructive of a previously established paradigm…Just because it did not involve the introduction of aditional objects or concepts, the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics illustrats with particular clarity the scientific revolution as a displacement of the conceptual network through which scientists view the world.”

In 100 years people will look back at us and say “they believed what, those fuckin morons” or whatever.

“Science” is not wrong. Some scientists are.

I am not saying science is bad just that science always proves science wrong.