Science

I think that science is a very useful tool when used within reason. It can lead to many answers and create new things for us to play with and enjoy, but it can't answer everything. Specifically I would say that it has problems dealing with social behaviors. Men have spent many millennia trying to figure out a way to predict women and still haven't even made any progress towards an answer. People are very complicated and usually unpredictable. It is impossible to predict everything that even the most predictable person will do. Science can however identify patterns with human interaction and emotion and there are some things that science can at least clarify a little if not explain. It is just important for people to see the restraints that science has and to use it for what it can do and not try to push it beyond that.

Science is definitely not controllable. Since most scientific discoveries happen by accident anyways the only way to control that would be to hide the discovery. Due to its nature though the same discovery would keep happening and so you would have to hide it over and over and eventually it becomes impossible to keep covering it up. All that man can do to hinder science is exactly that, just a hindrance. It will just slow down the scientific advancement but will never stop it. Not even the uses of science are controllable. Many scientific discoveries will invariable be used for purposes which they were not intended for, some of which aren't good but there is nothing that can be done to stop it. Laws can be made to prohibit the uses of things in some ways but as history has proven countless times, it is very easy to get around the law if there is a desire to do so. People and governments just need to do the best that they can to advance the science with beneficial possibilities and prohibit the use of science to do evil as much as possible.

The primary principle behind science is just to figure out what makes things do what they do, in other words just answering the question of "Why?" anything happens. This is naturally what people want to know, just like a young child will always ask their parents why things have to be a certain way, often times never stopping or being satisfied because there really isn't any end to the questioning. That is why theoretically scientists probably have one of the most stable jobs in regards to the almost limitless amount of information that they have to process and understand. Scientists are some of the only people that like to answer these questions. It makes many parents uncomfortable when their kids ask them why something happens. I think that the main reason for that is just because humans don't like the idea of not knowing everything and if we are asked a question that we don't know the answer to then we feel week and useless almost. I realise that this is a very broad generalization but it is somewhat of a subconscious feeling that everyone has, it is just more apparent in certain people. In short, it is the basic human fear of the unknown.

I would have to say that the most apparent case of science and society not being in step to me has to do with drugs. Although the penicillin problem was not necessarily within the last 30 years, this still happens today all the time. People always want drugs when they are sick because they think of them as a quick way to get better. Doctor's don't really want to deal with the issue so they just give out the drugs to the belligerent patients. Science then showed that this offering of medicine to anybody who wants it just makes the bacteria more resistant to that treatment, making everybody worse off in the end anyways. I have heard of some doctors trying to be much more careful about this now, but it is still a big problem. Personally, the last 5 times that I went to the doctor I got a prescription for something, even if there really wasn't anything wrong with me. I would go in wondering if I had a problem or an infection or something, and usually the doctor just says that he doesn't think it's an infection but that I should take this medication just in case. It is a good example of science caving to the naive views of society without really explaining the problems to them and then coming out later and saying that there is now an even bigger problem.