hat's what every generation says. Science is always looking for a better theory to explain. In fact that is science's modus operandi. Wouldn't it be wrong to claim that we do know?
7 days ago — TheMadFool

If you look at physics, most of what is being done today is derivative science. The best stuff was already done almost 100 years ago using spartan tools. The main difference today are the tools are much better and the number of scientists are greater, with everything generating data faster than the development of new grounding breaking theory. It is more about people collecting data, but doing less in terms of ground breaking analysis. One gets the impression science is now more about money and jobs than about truth.

A good example is in biology. About 50 years ago or so, it was discovered that proteins fold with exact folds. This observation was important, because biology was assuming a statistical model of life. Protein folding, on the other hand, was not following the laws of statistics; probability 1.0.

This should have raised a yellow flag in terms of the future direction of biology, but the caliber of science analysis was not there, to meet the needs of change. It was more about money and jobs, with statistical modeling as wasteful as it gets, and therefore useful to that purpose.

In fact, those who pointed this data out, were shunned for decades by the leaders of derivative science. The derivative science looks impressive, but this is due to the fancy technology able to compensate for the obsolete theory. The black box approach of statistics precluded the needs for too much thinking and needed a lot of man power, which was good for profits.

"How would you call that show? Philotainment?"

You mean to say "entertainment" as term of belittlement?

There is a retreat from thoughtfulness evident in the sense that instead of asking, as Rutherford still did, "Is this the real stuff, knowledge?", the most powerful tendency is to credit operative increases in effectiveness and power as Progress preemptively. One no longer genuinely asks anything, progress in guided missiles is a "fact", according to the sense of the word fact established by the Royal Society and now everywhere controlling human beings bodily (the old sense was the legal sense, a deliberate act, e.g., in the phrase "accessory after the fact"). Everywhere there is a bodily sense of this extraordinary progress which is not the sense of progress used in the Enlightenment or the subject of tunes such as the Ode to Joy. They just sound the same, but the human body electrifies differently under the word these days.

If there is a need for it, it must be progress. Technology is only concerned with how to do something. You do not raise the question why there is such a need or how killing people could ever serve a good purpose. This is where philosophy and religion sell themselves to the powers to be:
We are so understanding...

Like few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment. He formulat­ed the ambivalent relationship of enlightenment to power. Enlightenment must be "drummed into the people, so that the priests all turn into priests with a bad conscience-and likewise with the state. ..." However, enlightenment had always been a means employed by the "great artists of government ... The self-deception of the masses in this respect - for instance, in all democracies-is highly advantageous: making people small and governable is hailed as 'progress'!''

Dialectic of Enlightenment