Sometime back Edge posed a question What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? to some bright minds. Charles Simonyi believes that we are writing software the wrong way :-P, while Danny Hillis thinks we are getting better on the moral front. Freemon Dyson pulls a real whacky one! :)

I wish that the responses by scientists to these kind of questions, especially the new question posed by The Guardian, will be read and understood by the lay person. There are far too many misunderstandings about what science is all about and what its goals are. There is also a tendency to tag ideas as being "scientific" in an effort to give them more credibility, without properly understanding what it means to be scientific.

I like C.A.R. Hoare's answer, because it will help in that direction. Not everybody needs to understand scientific subjects -- in any case, there are far too many things to keep track of for even the most erudite polymath; but it is very important for everybody to know what the aims of science are.

-K