The Degradation of Public Science
In his 1915 essays titled ‘Travels to Alaska’, naturalist and mountaineer John Muir wrote:
…when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
Far less poetically, physicist Lawrence Krauss said in a 2009 lecture on his work ‘A Universe from Nothing’:
“We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a one percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.”
These two ways of perceiving reality are about as far apart as they could be. Yet they both represent a trajectory that seems to have occured in the way that public sciences have relayed to us what science means as an endeavour. In the first, science is the result of the extraordinary beauty and intelligibility of the universe, in the latter science has become a kind of tool for debunking and belittling, a lens that strips all meaning out of whatever it encounters. Krauss again tweeted in 2017:
