Phlogiston, during the hundred years running up to the time of the Revolution in America, was a theoretical substance which the best scientific minds of the Western world studied and proposed as an explanation for why some things burned well.
In our post-Enlightened times it’s easy to laugh, but this shit was taken very seriously by great thinkers for generations, not all that long ago.
I learned about it here:
Have We Really Found The Theory Of Everything?
The video mentions even more recent once-universally-revered, and now discredited and unfashionable theories, such as the steady-state model of the universe.
All this can be viewed through the lens of Progress, of course. But for me, the lesson is something more like: The more we know, the less we know. Moreover, placing any deep trust in Science is placing trust in mortal men with mortgages to meet and careerist ambitions like tenure to pursue. Radical thinking about the true nature of Nature is very much the exception rather than the rule within the Academy.
Here are two very recent variations on a theme, the first very short and the second very long, from the same channel.
“Someone has to rescue the physics community”
These are all scientists, talking among themselves.
I am not anti-science, any more than I am anti-Zoroastrianism.
I am however very much against the idea that “Science” is better than any other religion. It is just one more way that the human brain tries to understand itself and its dim perceptions of the reality around it. Its claims to be impartial, based only in experimental ‘fact’, or more true than all other ways … are exactly what any other absolutist belief system claims. In this view, I have no faith.
“Follow the Science!”. Hmmm. No thanks.
Look where that got us, last time out. As Saint Fauci has taught us again, accidentally, there are everywhere we look one thousand false prophets for every lonely sage.