The title of this article is borrowed from an interesting text on computing that you can read here.
People often think of science as a kind of religion. They see scientists as self-proclaimed keepers of the absolute truth, ruling over the fate of the “ignorant masses” from their ivory towers, dictating what is and isn’t science, who is right, and who is a madman or a fraud.
However, this view—like almost everything in life—is nothing more than a false, Manichean, and outdated idea. It has been repeated so many times that it has hardened into a stereotype.
It is possible that you have had your own experiences with scientists or the university machinery, leading you to believe that this idea of a “suppression engine” for alternative visions isn’t so far from reality. But what you are witnessing is not science: it is bureaucracy.
Science, like any other human discipline—be it religion, politics, or art—has built a superstructure of roles and managers around itself, originally intended to make things function better. Professors, deans, and all those people in their offices and cloisters are merely administrators. They allocate resources, evaluate papers, organize, and disorganize; above all, they fight amongst themselves in the eternal battle of egos and ideas that every human group with a common goal has fought since the dawn of time. But that, I repeat, is not science. That is simply the organization within which science is (sometimes) developed.
Science is, quite simply, an attitude, a tool for thought, and a way of working. When the long day of dialectical sparring and clerical work ends, the scientist descends into the depths of their mind. Often in the solitude of the laboratory and under the cover of night—for bureaucrats are diurnal animals who retreat to their burrows at sunset—they dedicate themselves to the core tasks of the scientist: studying and thinking.
They read and meticulously analyze the work of colleagues or masters, subjecting it to a mental “third degree.” They trace, step by step, the line of reasoning that led another scientist to their conclusions. They search for any nook, any crack through which an error or inconsistency might have slipped. This is not out of a desire to destroy; it is a conscious effort to discover the underlying laws of nature. It is the pursuit of correspondence truth—the knowledge that allows us to understand the world and ourselves. To achieve this, we must discard as many errors, artifacts, and intuitions as possible, leaving only what is backed by the naked data.
Science is a human activity; therefore, it can never be entirely free from our biases. However, it remains the most reliable tool discovered to date for advancing along the path of knowledge.
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