Questioning Scientific Titans

[TheRealJoeFish]

Here's how I view it: this is less a problem about science and scientists and more a problem about science history. It's really easy (or should be really easy) for any high schooler today to point out a billion flaws in the work or methods of the ancient Greeks, middle-ages scholars, Renaissance thinkers, 18th/19th century biologists and doctors, 19th/20th century physicists... But that's completely missing the point. When told of how someone did something ingenious (but flawed) for the first time (Archimedes, Euclid, Darwin, Bohr, whoever), the appropriate focus (at least from a lay perspective) is not on the difference between how that person did it then and how we do it today, but on the difference between how everyone else did it then (or, perhaps, how no one had ever done it then) and how the scientist made the breakthrough that got science and humanity so much closer than they had been before. Conversely, when someone points out flaws/inefficiencies in those sorts of breakthroughs, it's probably best not to deny or minimize the flaw/inefficiency but instead to explain it in historical perspective and show why it was amazing that the scientist got as far as he did when the tools (both tangible and intellectual) available at the time were a fraction of what we take for granted today (and try to use our understanding of those things to find flaws in our own theories and build even better ones).