Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Antiscience
demythologizing the process of science and in enlightening
younger scientists. Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles
Darwin, Gregor Mendel and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes.
But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork
prevails: what one of us, even the most brilliant among us,
misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and
capable, may detect and rectify.
For myself, I've tended in past books to recount some of the
occasions when I've been right. Let me here mention a few of the
cases where I've been wrong: at a time when no spacecraft had
been to Venus, I thought at first that the atmospheric pressure was
several times that on Earth, rather than many tens of times. I
thought the clouds of Venus were made mainly of water, when
they turn out to be only 25 per cent water. I thought there might
be plate tectonics on Mars, when close-up spacecraft observations
now show hardly a hint of plate tectonics. I thought the highish
infrared temperatures of Titan might be due to a sizeable greenhouse
effect there; instead, it turns out, it is caused by a
stratospheric temperature inversion. Just before Iraq torched the
Kuwaiti oil wells in January 1991, I warned that so much smoke
might get so high as to disrupt agriculture in much of South Asia;
as events transpired, it was pitch black at noon and the temperatures
dropped 4-6°C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke
reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared. I did not
sufficiently stress the uncertainty of the calculations.
Different scientists have different speculative styles, some being
much more cautious than others. As long as new ideas are testable
and scientists are not overly dogmatic, no harm is done; indeed,
considerable progress can be made. In the first four instances I've
just mentioned where I was wrong, I was trying to understand a
distant world from a few clues in the absence of thorough
spacecraft investigations. In the natural course of planetary exploration
more data come in, and we find an army of old ideas
ploughed down by an armamentarium of new facts.
Postmodernists have criticized Kepler's astronomy because it
emerged out of his medieval, monotheistic religious views; Darwin's
evolutionary biology for being motivated by a wish to perpetuate the
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