It’s too easy, with the benefit of modernity, hindsight, and all that, to regard science as the most fearless, objective, apolitical, democratic, and open-minded of human endeavors - the seeker of truth. Never mind anything by divine right . . .

Throughout the 16th century, as it gradually dawned on everybody that Columbus hadn’t, after all, hit some island off Japan or India (where he was headed at the time) but that he had in fact come across an entirely new continent, everything epistological hit the fan. For a comfortable 2,000 years, life, the universe, and everything had been what Aristotle . . . said it would be . . . So what was [America] doing there?

Things got rapidly worse in the first decades of the 17th century, as people like Galileo started seeing other centers of attraction, such as Jupiter circled by its moons. To compound the felony, sailors started coming back across the Atlantic to Europe with hundreds of new American animal and plant species that were not described in Aristotle’s list . . .

In the desperate search for some way to bail out the sinking ship or shut the stable door, a couple of quick thinkers came up with some solutions. One was a French engineer named Rene Descartes who . . . suggested that the only way to find truth was to go on doubting until you stripped away all dubious elements so as to arrive at a point where what remained was so self-evident that it was beyond doubt. That would be truth.

The other guy, an English legal eagle by the name of Francis Bacon, opted for correlation and analysis as a means of certainty. Amass enough evidence and you were halfway there. His admirers then came up with a Royal Society for doing this stuff, with correspondents all over the place sending in cards and letters filled with their observations. The Royal Society motto, “Take Nobody’s Word for It,” generated a procedure for making sure other people were seeing what you were seeing, known as “witnessing.” If enough people agreed they were all witnessing the same thing, then it was a “matter of fact.”

In the late 19th century, at the University of Nancy, France, the recent discovery of X-rays convinced people that other rays should be there too. Sure enough, once some guy demonstrated N rays (named after the town), they became a hot ticket to a Ph.D. And, no doubt, somebody got a degree, in N-ray studies. Then one day some American, who hadn’t heard about these rays, said the truth was he couldn’t see them. Sure enough, when everybody looked closer, nor could they. Collapse of theory.

This kind of collapse riddles the history of the so-called truth finding sciences. Here’s a list of the greatest hits of scientific theory collapse. For centuries it was known that disease came from miasma, a foul air emanating from marshes and putrescent materials and such creepy stuff . . . Until 1884, when Louis Pasteur discovered germs. For centuries electricity was a fluid . . . until 1820. It was a well-known fact rotten apples spontaneously generated little worms and grubs found inside them . . . until 1767. The atom was indivisible . . . until 1877 . . . Light was particles until 1801, when it became waves; until 1905, when it became particles again; until 1924, when it became both. And my all time favorite, the one that really makes my point: Space and time were absolutes until 1886, when Ersnt Mach introduced the insidious concept of relativity and set the stage for Einstein.

In the end, the can of worms Columbus opened with his trip to India is this: There is no truth to find. Truth is what you want it to be . . . (James Burke, Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000)