This circumstance seemed to me to indicate a problem. But it is becoming increasingly common knowledge that a harmful vision of science has been steadily taking over education in schools and universities. I only began to understand what was happening from an article by two deep-thinking physicists, Kurt Gottfried of Cornell University and Kenneth G. Wilson of Ohio State University, that was published this past spring in Nature. The two expressed concern that social scientists think scientific knowledge is merely a system of belief. This interpretation would imply that science is a subjective human construction, like art or music.
Many scientists do in fact underestimate how subjective their work is.
Such a particle would have profound implications for cosmology and particle physics. Further investigation showed the heavy neutrino to be an illusion, however. The repeated appearance of the number 17 in the experiments proved only the power of expectation. But the fact that science's social critics have a point does not justify their broader denial of the vast body of reproducible experiments linked to well-tested theories. It is difficult to speak uniformly about the so-called sociology of scientific knowledge because it embraces a number of schools of thought that adopt varying opinions about the external validity of such knowledge.