“Listen to the scientists” has become code for listen to a lot of nonsense that has no basis in science at all. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:
If there were a Mount Rushmore to memorialize the greatest scientists in US history, Richard Feynman’s face would almost certainly be on the monument.
He was only 24 years of age when he was recruited into a secret research group that eventually became part of the Manhattan Project, joining some of the other most prominent scientists of his age, like Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi.
Feynman went on to make unparalleled advances in the fields of particle physics and quantum mechanics. He conceived of nanotechnology as early as the 1950s, and quantum computing as early as 1982.
Feynman also won the Nobel Prize, plus countless other awards and medals; and he was ranked by leading scientists as one of the greatest physicists of all time– alongside Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Galileo.
In short, Feynman knew what he was talking about when it came to science.
One thing that was really interesting about Feynman is that, despite all of his success and credentials, he was the first to admit that nothing was truly certain and absolute, even in science:
“Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.”
Feynman railed against “myths and pseudoscience,” and the so-called experts that peddled their theories as unquestionable truth.
According to his biographer James Gleick, Feynman found this type of scientific absolutism to be like an “authority, against which science has fought for centuries.”
Or, as Isaac Asimov put it, “Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves.”
Yet now we’re being force fed a narrative that science is absolute and 100% certain… and that, above all else, we must listen to the scientists.
Or, more precisely, we must listen to the scientists they want us to listen to.
