Science, or more specifically, the Scientific Method, is probably the major contribution of Western culture to civilization. Many cultures have beautiful art and architecture. Many cultures have profound philosophies, both moral and metaphysical. But it was in the West that the scientific method was founded and flourished. To me that makes it sad that the public face of science has fallen into such ill repute. In short, science is a mess right now.
By now you have probably heard of the "replication crisis". Thousands of previously accepted scientific papers have been shown to be simply wrong. Many were just badly designed experiments that just didn't show what they purported to show. As far as I know, no one has done a study investigating whether these papers happened to come to conclusions that supported the opinions of the scientists involved, but it's a fair bet they did. Some have erroneously become conventional wisdom, and since they are almost entirely in the realm of social science, policies with consequences have been adopted under those mistaken beliefs. All this has given fuel to the critics who claim the soft sciences (social sciences) aren't really sciences at all. Whether they are or not, they are certainly not acting like it.
The hardest of the soft sciences -- psychology and economics -- are doing a bit better. There is fascinating work being done in the realm of evolutionary psychology although not much of it seems very rigorous so far. At least it's promising. Economics is struggling to come to terms with its limitations -- party due to all the work the evo-psych people are doing to undermine the assumptions of broad-based rationality in humans. Econometrics can't come to any agreed upon conclusions. You can find a legitimate quantitative studies that end in opposite results. So anything can be good or bad, depending on what you just read.
As we move along the "scientific hardness" spectrum we come to environmental science next, which is wholly dominated by global warming. (Tangent: Scott Alexander considers some of the environmental hot buttons from the past and what happened to them.) Without commenting on my opinion of it, the way high-profile advocates for global warming behave is shameful. They sell their theories like snake oil salesmen, appealing to fear and ignorance while using public ridicule to silence anyone who might question them, then claim scientific righteousness. I have come to the conclusion that the bulk of the people advocating for global warming don't really want to convince anyone of it. They want to raise their own status via demonstrating their superior intellect and rationality and, frankly, if everybody agreed with them, they couldn't do that.
The next step along the way is the biological sciences where, specifically with respect to genetics and microbiology, there are tremendous successes in research. Practical applications get bogged down in ethical issues and political bureaucracy, but at least the science is clipping along. One bright spot.
The harder the science, the less susceptible it is to these machinations of the human ego. Physics of course, is almost immune to twisting facts for a dopamine hit, but it's not immune to human flaws and limitations. Physics is in the doldrums. We can't reconcile the Quantum Mechanics with Relativity after nearly a century; the large and the small don't seem to agree on the nature of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider provided proof of the Higgs Boson, but nothing else interesting. It has been thus for nearly a century now and there seems to be little hope of a systematic breakthrough (there always remains the possibility of an random epiphany). Even the more recent discoveries (in my lifetime) of dark matter and dark energy are really just plugs to solve an equation. We have no clue of what they truly are.
A century hence, I can't imagine looking at this era as anything except a dry spell in scientific progress. If it continues, perhaps even a Dark Age. Or maybe it's forever. Maybe the low hanging fruit of the universe has been found and we are now in a time where it's centuries between breakthroughs instead of decades. Of course, that pessimism has been expressed before and has been uniformly mistaken. Still it has to happen eventually, and as we increasingly encounter situations where we can predict outcomes and measure results with great accuracy but can't describe what is going on, that does suggest we might be approaching a barrier which the evolutionary development of our brains hasn't prepared us to cross.
That's not to say any of this is holding up progress. Here is one list of interesting scientific discoveries just this year. With our technology we can measure things more accurately than ever. With our models we can predict the behavior of the world far better than ever, perhaps better than we would ever need to. There is enough science around to keep technological development going indefinitely so there is no need to be pessimistic about the quality of life. Still, it's very unsatisfying if the best we can do is treat existence as a black box.
Perhaps we should focus on how to evolve faster. That may solve the replication problem, too.
