I just wanted to second this recommendation - while the video is nearly an hour long, it feels much shorter and is well worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

You can argue that science "worked" in the case of string theory in so far as it (eventually) came to be seen as a lot of untestable mathematical games with zero experimental evidence to support it.

Of course, "follow the science" is more commonly interpreted as the scientific community consensus ~= the truth. So having a generation of physics that essentially ended up as "never mind" doesn't instill a lot of public faith that scientists know what they're talking about in general.

Its all very messy. The scientific method is about the best system we have. But the scientific method and academia are not the same thing. I've yet to find anyone besides some weird philosophers and contrarians who actually doubt the scientific method. But I find more and more people every day who doubt academia. And yeah. Its and industry made up of fallible people with incentives that are not aligned with the stated goals of said industry. We've had scandals. We've had falsified data. We've had falsified careers. And then there's the replication crisis where its possible an entire discipline is built on a foundation of slop. And then you have people who aren't technical themselves but chant trust the science as some kind of religious mantra. Which helps nothing frankly. And this mess leaves plenty of room for bad actors who take advantage of the situation and push their own warped agendas.

IMO public is generally critical of science unless they get some shiny toys out of it (and the causation is fairly immediate and obvious).

And, honestly, can you blame them? Nerdy places such as HN have a fascination of fundamental science that is nearly religious in some aspects - not in a sense of dogmaticism, but in a sense that pursuit of abstract knowledge is seen as noble and desirable in and of itself, with any justifications distinctly secondary. But from the perspective of your average person on the street, today, scientists are those people who ask for a lot of money, and use it to build those giant things that run some incomprehensible experiments which occasionally translate to some equally incomprehensible headlines in the news. And that person can think of many ways in which said money could be used to make their lives better instead.

Now, you can reasonably argue that long term, benefits are there regardless, even if they are not obvious, and thus the people actually in charge of allocation resources should disregard such simplistic takes and focus on that long term. But, either way, one cannot be surprised at the discontent.

> IMO public is generally critical of science unless they get some shiny toys out of it (and the causation is fairly immediate and obvious).

Someone commented in the Economist a few years back that the last subatomic particle to have commercial applications was the neutron.

Ehhh, that's a poor take. The indirect benefits of fundamental research like particle physics are massive.

We all know about how the web — which turned out to have a few commercial applications — was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in order to facilitate better collaboration and data sharing among researchers.

There's the advances in high-performance computing and data processing, medical imaging innovations like PET scans, fundamental tech for touchscreens, and so on.

And don't get me started on the motivational and inspirational value of science and how it encourages people to pursue engineering and other technical endeavors. Hard to measure, sure, but it's damn important. There's a reason the moon landing was the most watched event in the history of television.

It's difficult to overstate these indirect impacts.

Reminds me of N. David Mermin's famous saying that perhaps the greatest contribution of String theorists to science was creation of arXiv :-)

I think there are many layers between the people who read Brian Greene's books and watched the reproducibility crisis unfold, and the public that has "lost faith in science". When I hear the latter, I think of vaccine skepticism and flat earth theories, not students who decided to switch to engineering. I think clickbait headlines and internet bubbles are, relatively speaking, a much bigger problem than string theory and bad statistics.

Off-topic, but I think we should stop calling them bubbles as they are getting larger and longer-lasting. It's more like they are domes, which don't pop easily. You've got people lying to poll-takers, rage-bait videos of people pretending to believe things they don't, trolling as a lifestyle, shared culture based off of weird beliefs... people can get away with avoiding truth and reality for longer than they used to. They can have happy lives doing it. It's a huge societal shift that I don't think has been properly analyzed yet.

> When I hear the latter, I think of vaccine skepticism and flat earth theories, not students who decided to switch to engineering.

Do you believe this to be a high quality style of thinking, if you consider it from a disconnected, disinterested 3rd person perspective?

I’d wager most people don’t think about physical models of the universe at all