Science is only a way of understanding the real world in a predictable, repeatable way.

It seems that we have lost other connections to the real world, as suggested by Matthew B. Crawford in the May 21st article in the NY Times: The Case for Working With Your Hands.

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

It seems that, in many ways, we really don’t want to know how the world works.