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Motor ability in healthy people is almost perfect. We rarely stumble and fall, except in young and old age. We can learn tasks such as riding a bicycle or skating or skipping, jumping rope or driving a car, and retain that mastery for the rest of our lives. Even if we’ve gone a decade without doing it, it comes back to us effortlessly. The precision and retention of our motor skills may, however, give us a false sense of confidence in our other talents. Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn’t there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone. A most illuminating book called How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, shows how people systematically err in understanding numbers, in rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being influenced by the opinions of others. We’re good in some things, but not in everything. Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. ‘For Man is a giddy thing,’ teaches William Shakespeare. That’s where the stuffy sceptical rigour of science comes in.

Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudo-science is that science has a far keener appreciation of human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or ‘inerrant’ revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error -even serious error, profound mistakes - will be our companion

forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-assessment, whatever rueful reflections they may engender, our chances improve enormously.

If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? Both then are presented as unsupported assertion. In Russia and China, it used to be easy. Authoritative science was what the authorities taught. The distinction between science and pseudoscience was made for you. No perplexities needed to be muddled through. But when profound political changes occurred and strictures on free thought were loosened, a host of confident or charismatic claims - especially those that told us what we wanted to hear - gained a vast following. Every notion, however improbable, became authoritative.

It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of Nature than to detail the messy distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

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Science and Hope

Two men came to a hole in the sky. One asked the other to lift him up ... But so beautiful was it in heaven that the man who looked in over the edge forgot everything, forgot his companion whom he had promised to help up and simply ran off into all the splendour of heaven.

from an Iglulik Inuit prose poem, early twentieth century, told by Inugpasugjuk to Knud Rasmussen, the Greenlandic arctic explorer

I was a child in a time of hope. I wanted to be a scientist from my earliest school days. The crystallizing moment came when I first caught on that the stars are mighty suns, when it first dawned on me how staggeringly far away they must be to appear as mere points of light in the sky. I’m not sure I even knew the meaning of the word ‘science’ then, but I wanted somehow to immerse myself in all that grandeur. I was gripped by the splendour of the Universe, transfixed by the prospect of understanding how things really work, of helping to uncover deep mysteries, of exploring new worlds - maybe even literally.