Praxis
How Science Views Science
Core meme
Science, to the casual person, has left the realm of the esoteric and entered the realm of the mundane. This translation of ideas has left much room for the misunderstanding of scientific principles and misinterpretation of scientific knowledge. A new gap, quite like the rich to poor or tech savvy to not, formed between those who work with science and those who do not. This gap, however, may be bridged through transmission of memes. This requires no money (besides time), nor equipment (unless one leaves the domain of word-of-mouth).
Thoughts of some thinkers
The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and disgested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.— Francis Bacon, (1561-1626), Novum Organum, p 931
The young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.
... My answer to him was, "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
— Isaac Asimov, (1920-1992), referring to a correspondent, The Relativity of Wrong, p 2261
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
— Stephen Hawking, (1942 - present)
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
— Stephen Hawking, (1942 - present), A Brief History of Time, p 1741
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