Talk:List of popular misconceptions about science/Archive 2

For some earlier talk, see Scientific Mythology/Talk.

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While I understand your re-titling, I think it's a cop out. "Mythology" is a perfectly

meaningful word, and while it is misused and ruffles some feathers, I think it's better

to clarify its real meaning than to simply avoid it.

You're assuming, Lee, that once we've covered all the stories of science, we'll have a large, important topic in addition, called the mythology of science. I really doubt that.

And besides, if we are going to cover mythology at all, how do we justify using the

word for Greek, Roman, Sumerian, and other cultural and religious traditions and not

for Christian, Hindu. scientific, or other cultures? The only difference, it seems to

me, is there aren't any Sumerians around to complain. That's hardly a difference worth

changing titles for. --LDC

As I see it, it's easy to justify that. To wit, there aren't (to my knowledge, anyway) Greek, Roman, and Sumerian religionists about to complain that their stories are actually true, and that we should not be prejudicing Wikipedia's readers against them. There are many Christians, Muslims, and Jews about who will rightly complain that saying that their stories, which they believe are true, are part of a "mythology" is inherently biased. If everyone stops believing those stories, then in the context of Wikipedia with its neutral point of view policy, we can safely label them "mythology." --LMS

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Readded the influence on story telling to science. The problem was brought up by James Burke.

Some of the examples of how story telling affects scientific education are my own, but

1) I think I am qualified to make those statements based on personal experience and 2)

they aren't particularly controversial statements among science teachers. -- Chenyu

James Burke is not, to my knowledge, a well-respected authority on the history of science: he is a popularizer, isn't he? --LMS

Joseph, with great respect for your expertise otherwise, I very much doubt you are an expert on this. Am I wrong? In what articles or books have you developed this theory? --LMS

For example, according to Joseph Wang 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.