I'm torn between asking "citation please?" and "you're not from Earth, are you?"

I'm more inclined to attribute it to Hanlon's razor. Somebody read only the first half of my post, and assumed I was dissing science.

Yup. I already linked to that essay in another post in this thread.

I have been modded troll. Apparently I wasn't clear enough.

Science does not claim to know the truth, because it only deals in falsifiable conclusions. Instead, science endeavours to shrink-wrap the tightest possible boundary around the truth, by following a discipline of self-examination and self-correction. For this reason, I assert that science is the best possible way to pursue the truth.

However, I admit that not all truths can be pursued with science, because not everything can be observed and analyzed by a scientific method. Love, spirituality, the arts, etc., can all claim to pursue truth in their own way.

Scientists don't "vote" to determine what is correct. They achieve a consensus that is informed by experimental results.

That depends on whether the inaccuracy matters in context.

For example, Newton's laws of motion and gravitation do an excellent job of predicting the motion of the planets. Yet, they have a very small but measureable inaccuracy in the prediction of the precession of Mercury's orbit. Einstein's theory of gravitation corrects this inaccuracy. That doesn't mean Newton's laws are "wrong" -- they just have a limitation to their applicability.

Science does not claim to know the truth, but it is indisputably the best way we have to pursue the truth.

Strictly speaking, it's not even an oblate spheroid, but very slightly pear-shaped.

For more details, read this excellent essay by Isaac Asimov.

Believe me, I'm not keen on corruption of language (see my other posts.) But you have to admit, the "-gate" suffix is kind of useful. And it has some staying-power, as a result of the Watergate scandal.

Eventually it will become an anachronism and disappear. For now, let's not get too worked up about it.

This.

The obvious examples from history are of course extreme, but worth noting: the excesses of Stalin, the purges of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the prosecution of scientists (and others) by the Inquisition, and so on.

Your Mom and I forgive you. :-)

NASA's mission-statement used to include earth science (in the context of aeronautical and space platforms.) That changed in February 2006, during the Bush administration.

And energy is conserved if the system is invariant over a translation in time.

Hooray for Emmy Noether.

Nah. More like 2060.

This might be another Cold Fusion moment. Or, it might be the start of something very interesting.

When an experiment contradicts a theory, there are two possibilities: (1) there's something wrong with the experiment; or (2) there's something wrong with the theory. If the correct answer is (1), then it's par for the course: mistakes happen, and the process of science corrects them eventually. But if the correct answer is (2) then it's cork-popping time, because you have discovered new science.