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Science is NOT just another opinion

Why science struggles to overcome popular opinion that flies directly in the face of simple reason and logic

Patrick Heller
3 min readAug 27, 2020

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When you dive into the world of science, you will find two things that might feel counterintuitive at first. To begin with, it turns out that most scientists are usually pretty unsure about just about everything and they will be the first to admit that.

I believe it was Albert Einstein who said, “More the knowledge, lesser the ego. Lesser the knowledge, more the ego.” It will actually be hard to find a peer-reviewed publicly published article in an authoritative scientific journal which does not state that more research is needed on this or that. On the contrary, it would be rather impossible to find a paragraph in such an article that reads, “The results are in, no further research is needed in our opinion. We’ve got you covered, never mind any alternatives. Don’t believe anything else they try to tell you, now or in the future — this is it”.

Secondly, whenever a scientist has the audacity to make a new claim, their peers take a huge sledgehammer to the new theory and start slamming it with a vicious fervor until there is nothing left. Or, when the smoke clears, they pretty much agree that the claim might actually hold. That is until the next smart-ass…

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Patrick Heller
Patrick Heller

Written by Patrick Heller

Change Expert ★ Author ★ Speaker

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