Did you know that "matter" is (likely) derived from "mater", Latin for "mother"? http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=matter That makes your last sentence deliciously tautological :-)

replying to undo moderation.

I'd suggest you read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see that science appears to work very differently than you (and many others) think. Scientist tend to prevent any substantial change in their paradigm as long as possible---for example by "tweaking" theories or devising auxiliary hypotheses.

One more thing: I didn't mean you should look at the content of Bringhurst's book, I meant look at the book.

You make some good points. Digital technology absolutely makes it easier to design books. No doubt about that. The problem with digital publishing is that (at the moment) you have limited control (even with pdf) over how the reader will see your 'book'.

The format of a book, the font, binding and paper should ideally complement the content—that's pretty hard to do if you read all your books on one e-reader. Now, don't get me wrong, nice books have always been a niche product and will remain so. I have no problem with that and many (maybe most) texts will be fine in electronic form. I just wanted to explain that there are some aspect of paper books that can't be replicated in e-readers.

Proper typography, book design, binding, nice paper, interesting format, etc. can make a book into a work of art. Unfortunately most books produced these days are anything but that. For a good example of great book design look at Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style or Edward Tufte's books. I doubt their electronic versions would be anywhere as beautiful.

As an Anonymous Coward mentioned down below, the chemistry of oxidising pyrimidine to uracil is utterly trivial. No chemist would be even slightly surprised that it happens after illumination by UV light. This brings us no closer to understanding the origins of life than we were 100 years ago.

Protein kinase C is one of the most important intracellular signalling enzymes. If you block it in the whole organism you die pretty quickly. I.e. the trick is in blocking it selectively only in dopaminergic neurons. Let's say it's not trivial.

completely offtopic but `hoi' in `hoi polloi' is an article, therefore adding `the' is somewhat redundant :-)

The most relevant is T.S.Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution. The most interesting (and with a much larger scope) is Paul Feyerabend's Against Method.

This seems like the only bit of discussion where people actually know something about the history of science and know that things weren't as clear cut then as we seem to think now. Anyway, I guess you're suggesting that Copernicus was the third case, i.e. he proposed a theory that could be empirically validated/falsified and was (presumably) better than the previous model. Well, in fact Copernicus' system was significantly worse in empirical adequacy (correspondence to observation) than Ptolemy's (at that time), wasn't really all that simpler (Copernicus assumed, with Aristotle, that planets have circular orbits and therefore needed epicycles too). Copernicus' system only received `real scientific' support much later from Newton's mechanics (but that was based on Copernicus so it's a bit circular). From several historical studies (Kuhn's for one) it seems that Copernicus' motivation for a heliocentric theory was a) that Ptolemaic system verged too far from Aristotle (orbits of planets weren't circular any more with all those epicycles) and b) the worship of the Sun in the renaissance period. Doesn't sound like `science' (as you define it) to me...