Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

182 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
VI. That science has absolute control over its creations.
Most of us go to sleep secure in the knowledge that genetic engineers
are following all those guidelines (that they, in their superior wisdom also
established), and that therefore Godzilla will not spring out of a test tube,
at least not while we're alive.
It might appear to the discerning that Principles V and VI cannot both
be true: yet that is the nature of true religion, which cannot be imagined
without paradox and contradiction! Read, for example, Rudolph Otto's
"The Idea of the Holy."
VII. That the lifelong gratification of idle curiosity must produce all the
raptures experienced by the mystics of the Middle Ages.
What indeed is this much jubilated "Scientific Method," if not the promise
of some delectation of infinite and perpetual bliss in the discovery, for
example, that (Catalan's Conjecture) the Diophantine Equation, xy - uv = 1,
has only one non-trivial solution in integers, namely x = 3, y = 2, u = 3; or
that the uncovering of counter-examples, if there are any, would require more
computer capacity than that presently available over the entire planet!
Alas, that Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Suso, Thomas a Kempis,
St. John of the Cross, and so many others were not born in our glorious
age of scientific faith, so that they might achieve union with the Ultimate
Reality through computing 20 million roots of the Reinmann Zeta on the
line s = 1 + iy, or through bashing in the brains of a thousand monkeys to
learn about head injuries, or through counseling the world for more than
half a century that it must find some way of copulating with its mothers
to achieve psychological health, or through using the inhabitants of Bikini
Atoll as guinea pigs for the study of radiation sickenss, or through elaborating
very complex and involuted theories with no experimental basis, no
predictive power, and hardly any theoretical purpose, such as string theory
in particle physics.
Twenty years of wasted effort in the elaborate gymnastics of string theory
must be worth, in the free market, at least a dozen visions of the Virgin
Mary in tenth century gold crowns.
VIII. That Science is value-free.
Most of these abominations are justified, sooner or later, by arguments
to the effect that Science is unable to determine values. There is, in other
words, a limit even to the great powers of the Scientific Method. A book
of matches is also value-free; this hardly give us the right to use it for the
purposes of burning down someone's house.
The "ultimate benefit" argument, and the "value-free" argument are
frequently employed by the same official personages, usually in the same
paragraph.