ltural. The methods of thinking about science today are predominantly Western-centric, but that is not to say other cultures around the world have not developed their own scientific cultures. One need only look back at the height of Islamic science under the Ottomans, or Indian scientists like Bose and Raman to see how, under different cultural norms and assumptions, science still flourished independently of Western culture.
Modern science (at least till the advent of the 21st Century) has taken a diversified and specialised approach, where each individual field runs independently and does not need to interact with other fields. However, in recent years, there have been a lot of cross-faculty research going on where scientists now realise they need other people with different ways of seeing problems to partner with. This holistic way of viewing science has fundamentally been the way science has been done from the Mayans to the Australian aboriginals to the Chinese. These ways of thinking, however, have been swept away with the mass colonialization of other cultures and imposition of a Western-centric view of science. We can and should learn a lot from how other cultures approached science and understood nature.
The presentation of science is subjective. It is simply easy to misreport an article with the title “excess sleep may lead to more fatigue throughout the day” as “scientists have shown we should sleep less”.
Is science the answer to everything?
The second trap one can fall into is intellectual hubris, or scientism. Science, as shown above, is fundamentally empirical and is descriptive, not prescriptive. In The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (1955) by Werner Heisenberg, he emphasises that:
a natural science is one whose propositions on limited domains of nature can have only a correspondingly limited validity… modern science, in its beginnings, was characterised by a conscious modesty; it made statements about strictly limited relations that are only valid within the framework of these limitations.The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (1955) by Werner Heisenberg
The nature of science is that prevailing theories are constantly being superseded by better theories, and only remain true within certain validities. It is foolhardy at best to treat science as a panacea for all of life’s maladies, because there are limits to the things that science can describe. This is an important framework especially when presented with information like miracle cures, because each problem has its own separate cause, and cannot be brushed aside with the same brushstroke.
The problem with putting science on a pedestal is that one will get stuck in a closed feedback loop and dismissing other theories as wrong. Science is a continuous endeavour, and should be treated as such. On one hand, it is all too common for people on comment sections to constantly rely on science to back up every possible argument, from the anti-vaccination movement to flat-earth societies. On the other hand, there have been theories which have been considered absolutely preposterous historically that have been proven to be the keys to unlock previously impenetrable gateways. The textbook example of that would be the cosmological constant, which Einstein reportedly said was his “greatest blunder”. It is now used as a way to track fluctuations in space and the mysterious “dark energy”.
This is especially prevalent when (pseudo-)intellectuals try to advance their personal ideologies in the name of “science”. One only need recall the way the Nazi regime misused genetics to support a racist “science” to see this in action. Another area one can see it today is in militant atheism and overzealous religious apostles, both of whom can be guilty of pushing for an agenda under the veil of cosmology or advocating for creationism at the expense of evolution. By insisting on their viewpoints and not giving others the benefit of the doubt, it is difficult to progress in knowledge. Science should be conscious of its limits, and we should be too. Treading the middle ground through b