It seems that, to try to explain better what I was saying, I will have to write a full essay of sort… I am going to do this now. It’s an enormously complicated subject. It calls on the notion of science versus fluff. Paradoxically, real practicing scientists, I would say, study fluff. Engineers know science.

I will quote you in it (if you don’t mind). Oxygen and pasteurization: engineers know plenty enough what those are.

Ether and e = mcc. Nobody knows what those are, and are not, enough to make serious engineering out of them. (I know the basic theory of nuclear fission; e = mcc illustrates it, it’s not central to it; also I know the Casimir effect enough to know that its interpretation is not clear about the structure of the ether… hmmm, let me talk like a physicist, i mean, vacuum…)

I actually had the extreme pleasure to talk with Feynman about both subjects, one on one, and he agreed with my not-so-subtle and fully iconoclast opinions; Feynman was completely different from any other physicist I have met, except for Louis de Broglie; the greatest are something else in another world.

Now both are dead, but I hope that their inquiring spirit lives on. In face of the unknown, let’s have ambitious, but honest minds. No, Hawking, we don’t know the history of time. You don’t know the history of time. I can compare the modesty of the inventor of Feynman diagrams, motivated by his care about distinguishing between what was proven, and what was not, with the arrogance of those who speak like the bible, and they know it all, ever since all was.

I subscribe to both Nature and Science. I hope hedge fund managers have put me on the target list… That will give me another reason to welcome their hatred.
PA

Lavoisier proved that combustion actually added mass to a compound. This ran counter to common sense – even today, ask a layman about it! Naming that extra mass led to oxygen.

Pasteur proved false an universal assumption, that of spontaneous generation. Such a simple experiment, never tried before because the assumption was held as common sense truth.

“Common sense” misconceptions can even outlive their debunking.by centuries: “ether” is still commonly used in literature to designate interplanetary vacuum, even though it has long been admitted that wave transmission from stellar bodies did not need that hypothetical super-thin medium.

And the idea that today’s common man knows more science than Newton does not hold water. People know, or think they know, ABOUT science: a pitiful handful of factoids, mostly anecdotal. How many can associate square distances with gravity, the most elementary Newton discovery? E=MC² is found on T-shirts but explanations are few and far between! And the successful abuse of the words “magnetic” or “field” by all kinds of hack doctors shows the actual depth of this common sense science “knowledge”.

I suggest a thought experiment.

Let’s assume some Maxwellian demon, or its modern equivalent some ultra-plutocrat, realizes that as science becomes more difficult to grasp for himself and his peers, they may someday lose their control on it and face a revolt of the scientists. Rather than be content with the current preventative measure of injecting the populace with the pervasive notion of the “mad scientist”, he (being maybe of the neocon persuasion) decides to preemptively strike and exterminate all non-laymen. (Easy enough, by hacking the “Science Magazine” AAS website and slipping subliminal messages ordering the viewers to jump from the nearest window). This would have rather mild demographic consequences, but ALL science would have to redone from scratch starting with the measurement of the Earth’s diameter. The vague notions in laymen’s minds about the 2nd Law of thermodynamics or relativity or the genome would need centuries before materializing again, possibly incomplete, possibly different. Engineers would climb to the upper scales of the social ladder, but the current technology would at best be stuck in its present state, to slowly fritter away as resources went out. Not to be gloomy though, soccer and cricket scores would be kept intact in mankind’s memory forever.