How far we have come from
Francis Bacon?
I believe what Bacon wrote about was the Kingdom or Realm of God, and the Kingdom or Realm of Man, and what is approprate to each. I don't believe he would have approved, or even understood, the ultimate extension of the scientic method today, by the great anti-theoretician theoretician B.F. Skinner to the denial of mind, consciousness, belief and God.
But two comments on WhiskeyJack's interesting writeup:
- "The observer notices an interesting behavior in the world around him, and tries to develop a model to explain it." Only what appeals to an observer's interest makes it into the arena of science. Not very scientific. But the origin of all knowledge is simply the human mind, or spirit. It has always seemed curious to me that the final goal of the enterprise has been to deny the very existence of that which initiated it. (?!)
- "This last part is called "peer review" and is one of the most important provisions of the method. Without it, there would be no way to reliably weed out bad results over time." The case of Pons and Fleischmann is interesting. Their work was dismissed out of hand, even without the results being known, by those who ought, if they were true scientists, to have waited until many trials were taken, and "peer-reviewed". And if science is that project of the truly interim, until a better idea, a better hypothesis and better test comes along, nothing is final. But science is like anything else; it has its ideology, and its actuality. Those who are ambitious; those who cheat; and those who work the system better than others.
How has science come to be placed on a pedestal, when, though often accurate, it is often myopic?