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Introduction

People who don't understand science often think that science is about 'facts' and 'numbers', reliable things which can be proved, in contrast to religion which is about believing in things which cannot be proved.  But science is about seeking to understand the world around us, which inevitably relies on words and ideas which change their meaning as our understanding deepens (see Why the words we use in physics obscure the true nature of reality), and religion (much of it, anyway) does the same, focussing on a different aspect of reality - the purpose, as opposed to the particles.

Scientific Activity

Science is a complex human system which includes training and employing scientists, funding research, and publishing papers which contain the results of that research.  A long time ago, science was a hobby pursued by gentlemen and clergy in their spare time; but science now is big business, a major economic driver, and every aspect of it is driven by financial considerations.

One major issue is that negative results don't get published; as a consequence, a significant amount of research simply duplicates previous failed attempts, which nobody wants to talk about.  This is a particularly significant problem in the pharmaceutical industry, where poorly designed experiments can lead to ineffective and dangerous drugs being prescribed.  Why don't they get published?  Because the scientific journals need to make a profit, and they believe that their sales would suffer if much of their output consisted of detailed accounts of experiments which produced no interesting results.

In recent years, there is an additional problem cause by scientists (mostly) using AI to generate papers for publication.  The system cannot handle the volume of papers being submitted, and for most of these papers there is essentially no way to tell if the content is true or not.

Sabine Hossenfelder has produced an excellent video, "How I lost trust in scientists", which beautifully deals with the nature of science in just 10 minutes, answering the climate change sceptics in passing.  Also, in September 2024, she recorded a takedown of a claimed 'new theory of everything', which demonstrates a systemic failure of the current system of publishing scientific papers.  It's also quite funny, if you like that sort of thing.

Science is driven by money; it is also driven by human ambition and ego.  Every scientist wants to be a successful scientist, which means achieving more significant results than your peers, publishing more papers, and publishing papers which are referenced in other papers more often.  Significant success also involves winning awards, and winning the very competitive battle for secure funding.

The goal of science

There is a longstanding argument about the goal of science.  There are two main camps.

• The goal of science is to document observed regularities.
• The goal of science is to explain observed regularities. 

These are both beliefs: there is no scientific test to determine which goal is the correct one; and they are both useful in different contexts.  The second group say that facts without understanding are not enough, while the first group say that the explanations we produce are (or can be) no more than technical 'Just So Stories'.  The conflct between these two opposing ways of understanding science can be unpleasant at times.

Outside the scientific community, many people believe something quite different.

• The goal of science is to explain everything.

Linked with this, and partly within the scientific community, is the desire to find the 'theory of everything', some principle or equation which is simple enough to print on a t-shirt, and which explains everything.  For a certain value of 'everything'.  Implicit in this is a process of ontological  reductionism: Chemistry is nothing more than applied Physics; Biology is nothing more than applied Chemistry.  And the Humanities, presumably, are nothing more than applied Biology.  Douglas Adams created a parody of this kind of science with 'Deep Thought' and the answer to the ultimate question.

Scientists have been explicitly seeking a theory of everything - everything in Physics, at least - for around a century now: the 'Standard Model' which is generally accepted by almost everybody explains (within the framework of Physics) everything in the material universe, except for gravity, Dark Matter (maybe 27%) of the universe and Dark Energy (maybe 68% of the universe).  So, for all our progress, we seem to have achieved a partial understanding of some 5% of the universe.  

Michael Brooks, writing in New Scientist (7 February 2024), reported that there are now several plausible approaches being explored in an attempt to find a 'theory of everything': Why physicists are rethinking the route to a theory of everything.  String Theory may have run out of steam, but Jaroslav Trnka and Nima Arkani-Hamed are following the amplituhedron idea; Peter Woit is using spinors and twistors to create what he hopes are the foundations of a theory of everything; and the approach of Renate Loll and others is called Causal Dynamical Triangulation, or CDT.

We need to say more around the subject of 'Thinking About Science'.  In the meantime, there is a helpful 20 minute video summary of one important aspect - The Crisis In Physics: Are We Missing 17 Layers of Reality?  In short, it's very unlikely - but we may be missing 5 to 8 layers of reality.  Or, perhaps the whole methodological basis of science has started to fail.