Many non-scientists demand to know the answers to everything right away — and when science inevitably fails to deliver on some front, they get disillusioned and cling instead to an alternative worldview, as in a holy book, that offers certainty and a tidy, cookie-cutter explanation of the universe.
That’s not how science works.
Science doesn’t know everything about the universe yet — and it probably never will. Science sometimes contradicts itself. Occasionally a new theory is adopted, and what once seemed certain is discarded.
Science never gets complacent; it is always focused on expanding boundaries. Probing at the frontiers of knowledge sometimes leads to breakthroughs but also on occasion inevitably results in going down rabbit-holes and turning down dead-ends.
But so long as the scientific method is properly applied, even “failed” experiments are legitimate and worthwhile inquiries, because if someone didn’t go there first, then we’d never know what was there to begin with.
If previous generations had been content with their status in life and deluded themselves into believing they had already discovered everything worth knowing, and were so afraid of being wrong about something that they never experimented at the frontiers of knowledge, then we’d all still be huddled around fire pits using stone tools.
Thank goodness our ancestors weren’t afraid of being wrong.
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