How Did Classical Science Turn into Science (TM)?
From now on, I will refer to the old-fashioned practice of following the scientific method as the classical science. Like classical music, it is long-lasting. Science (TM), on the other hand, is what you must “trust” at gunpoint, even though its edicts change at “the speed of science” (likely trademarked by Pfizer). But how did classical science turn into this monster?
To answer that, you need to look into the history of the last century. Not too long ago, science was small, and scientists had modest expectations. For example, when Einstein moved to Princeton in the early 1930s, his yearly salary was $10K ($200K in today’s dollars). In fact, this was way beyond Einstein’s own modest expectation of only $3K ($60K today). Although Einstein was world famous by then, he was happy to earn less than an average US worker ($4800/year).
Because science was small, scientists did research in their spare time after teaching. Only a few of them became full-time scientists. Einstein was a rare non-teaching scientist at the Institute of Advanced Studies. Feynman did not like the idea of doing research full-time, because he found the process of simplifying ideas to undergraduate students rejuvenating. In those days, scientists also operated their own journals through scientific societies, and those journals were quite modest.
Then the US government opened up its money floodgate and turned every scientific effort into a Manhattan Project or a Space Race. This had three bad effects -
Science became industrialized (“Big Science”), and the universities increasingly considered large government grants as their primary source of funds. Those grants not only paid for the scientists, but also for an army of administrators.
A large part of the government money got recycled through the military, and thus the activities of scientists became state secret (i.e. “classified”).
Scientists lost control of their journals, and the commercial ventures moved in.
In fields like biology, medicine and especially genetics, 1-3 had the most ill-effects. The cultures of mathematics, physics and chemistry were set in the old continent, and it was hard to turn Fermat’s Last Theorem into a Manhattan project. In contrasts, the biologists invented Manhattan projects one after another. Who won the “War on Cancer” declared in 1971? Ans. professional scientists and commercial journals. If you have not noticed, it morphed into Cancer Moonshot(SM) !! The Manhattan Project metaphor became Space Race metaphor irrespective of what happened to cancer.
And now let me present the following gem right from Pfizer’s own website, because it touches almost all points mentioned above. Do you think Pfizer is talking about classical science or Science (TM)?