Science in Its Rightful Place
President Obama has stated in his inaugural address, " We will restore science to its rightful place ." I guess that I am less that sure about where that place is. What is science's place? If it has been displaced, what has usurped it? I am sure to those (such as myself) who still hold a Modernist viewpoint, science is pretty much authoritative. And for questions that it was created to answer, science does pretty well. I am a big advocate of Western allopathic medicine, physics, information theory, and most of the rest of the Dead European White Man package. Given the choice between antibiotics and accupuncture and herbal cures, I say, "Pass the pills, please." But physical science was created to answer one category of questions, not every category. One of the big lessons of the 20th century is that while science is good at answering questions of "how," (as in, "How do I build a bridge that spans the Golden Gate?"), it pretty much fails when ...