List of popular misconceptions about science

There are many stories that inform our understanding of the history of science and technology. Some of these are perfectly true, some are questionable, and some are known to be false.

Commentators on the history of science, such as James Burke, have pointed out the limitations of using dramatic historical stories to teach science. In the attempt to fit the history of science into a tale with a moral lesson, there is a tendency to simplify complex historical realities, and this tends to give the general public a misimpression about what scientists do and how the process of science works.

For example, (according to whom???) scientific myths often contain an inspired "heroic" genius, and this obscures the role of social communication and collaboration in the scientific process as well as contributes to the perception that science is too hard for mere mortals to undertake. Also, scientific myths often contain an "evil" establishment, and this obscures the fact that there are often good reasons why the establishment believes what it does and that in many cases, the established view turns out to be correct. Scientific myths also tend to either overstate or understate the role of chance in scientific discovery, and the tendency to emphasis the dramatic, tends to understate the incremental progress that consitutes most scientific advancement.

Also in the effort to create a dramatic story, scientific myths tend to reduce theory verification to one dramatic experiment which is claimed to prove a theory (i.e. Michaelson-Morley). This leads to the misperception that scientific theories are fragile in that they are based on a few crucial facts, when in fact most scientific theories are robust in that they are based on many independent lines of evidence and can withstand cases in which some interpretations of data later turn out to be incorrect.

We need further general discussion here...

Some of the stories of science include:

• Isaac Newton's apple

• Galileo Galilei's cannonballs off the leaning tower of Pisa, and some stories about his persecution by the Catholic Church

• Archimedes' "Eureka"

• Columbus's "discovery" of America, or the round Earth

• The evolution of the Peppered Moth during the Industrial Revolution

See also history of science and technology.

/Talk