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Science Is Wrong
For scientists this can be the hardest thing about dreams
Do not believe what the scientists tell you. The natural history we know is a lie, a falsehood sold to us by wicked old men who would make the world a dull gray prison and protect us from the dangers inherent to freedom. They would have you believe our planet to be a lonely starship, hurtling through the void of space, barren of magic and in need of a stern hand upon the rudder.
— Exalted 1st edition rulebook

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor)
— Alan Sokal

The extreme end and/or reason for Science Is Bad. May overlap by also presenting scientists as bad and wrong. Science is badong.

In this trope, science is simply wrong: it lacks objectivity and does not describe anything "real". There are a number of general forms in which the error of science is considered:
  • As culturally constructed rather than objective, thereby does not describe any "facts"
  • As a system of beliefs and processes crafted by Dead White European Men (DWEM) and thus irrelevant and destructive to groups X, Y, Z...
  • As simply ineffectual in providing an adequate understanding of the world
  • Much more rarely in a fictional verse the natural laws, or just some of them, are such that attempts to analyse them scientifically are doomed to failure. In such a case its normally made clear they're not commenting on science in the real world.

As you can no doubt see, while some of these criticisms might be true of some scientists or scientific institutions, it's pretty much impossible to apply them to science itself without being ignorant or crazy.

This is not the same kind of wrong as that in the Scale Of Scientific Sins, there it's ethically wrong.

See also Mother Nature Father Science, Aesoptinum, Science Marches On. A common feature of The Masquerade. When overlapping with Science Is Bad, can be associated with Dumb Is Good. If Science Is Useless, this may be because it's wrong. May be presented through a Straw Vulcan.

This can be hard to reconcile that Magic A Is Magic A. There really shouldn't be any reason a system of observation can't find a pattern with magic unless that magic is specifically changing its behavior upon being examined. Even when this is the case; it often seems the only time magic changes its rules is to invoke this trope.

Often any Agent Scully questioning the magic isn't really using science but rather a belief in machines. A good scientist wouldn't only complain that something isn't possible upon discovering something that contradicts previous knowledge. They'd explore the implications, test why the result is happening, see if it can be replicated, and list the various causes and effects that can be observed related to the event. Naturally good scientists are rare when this trope is invoked.

Examples:

Genres
  • Romanticism
    • A debatable example is the work of HP Lovecraft. Among other things, his state as a romanticist is not absolutely agreed-upon and his own complexity might see obstructive to the application of this trope.
    • Well, his works, which are mostly science fiction usually seem to insinuate that above the scientific laws that we know there are many that we don't have a slightest idea about, and would throw our worldview topsy-turvy if we even find out. Considering that he wrote this when Einsteinian physics was finally taking over Newtonian models, and it had just been discovered that the Milky Way wasn't the whole universe, but a tiny little part of it, he did have a point, though fewer people ultimately went Mad From The Revelation than he would have imagined.
  • Philosophical Idealism, and its Eastern analogue, the Consciousness-Only schools of Buddhism. These posit the phenomenal world as being something that takes place entirely within consciousness. Reality therefore has no intrinsic existence outside of our conscious experiences.
    • A famous Zen parable that describes this has two disciples arguing about a flag waving in the wind. The first disciple claims that the wind is blowing the flag, the second disciple argues that it is the flag which drives the wind. The master overhears this and corrects them both, saying "It is the mind that moves."

Literature
  • H.F., the narrator of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, eventually concludes that all the proposed scientific explanations for plague are incorrect, including the microbial theory which we understand today as true
  • In Milton's Paradise Lost, Raphael tells Adam that God would laugh at astronomers who try to understand the motions of His heavens. Keep in mind that this was written centuries ago.
    • But also keep in mind that most of the basic theories of astronomy were already well in place. Milton was more likely saying that God laughed at astronomers because the universe was so vast that human attempts to understand it were kind of funny.
  • This has been systematized in Discworld: "A 1 in a million chance will happen nine times out of ten" has been proved in laboratories in the Discworld (thus becoming science). If three brothers vow to undertake a quest, and two die, it is physically impossible for the third to fail. Also known as the "Theory Of Narrative Causality." Several characters of what would for our world be more sensible thinking sometimes insist that 'things don't work that way' when, for instance, people inherit things by means other than genetic. Although they sometimes try to seem like the only sane people for insisting on such an attitude, in Discworld reality they are ignoring the very real fact that things do work that way there.
  • The first book in The Dresden Files has Harry mentioning that Science has been treated as the source of all the answers in the 21st century, which means people are left without a clue when they encounter the supernatural. The attitude tones down soon after that.
    • Its not so much that science is wrong, but that scientific thinking can be a hindrance when approaching the supernatural.
      • Plus, anything more complicated than a revolver fails near anything magical. So cameras, microscopes, and any other tools you'd use to study the supernatural and thus make it natural won't be very helpful. Physics still beats magic plenty of times in the books, though.
    • There is a bit of irony in this. Jim Butcher, like all competent Sci Fi/Fantasy writers, puts fairly strict rules on magic in his books, lest the plot devolve into a long chain of Deus Ex Machina. Magic has rules of operation with predictable and reproducible outcomes. The end result: Magic in the Dresden Universe is just as much a science as chemistry or physics.
      • Something Harry Himself says a few times.
  • Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift, both of whom portray scientists as busybodies with way too much time on their hands, coming up with complex solutions to simple problems or silly answers to things that don't need answering. Aristophanes' Socrates explains that thunder is not caused by Zeus, but (as science has proven) clouds farting. Swift's Laputans attempt to replace language with a system of tapping sticks and visual signs, but "the masses rebelled, demanding to speak in the manner of their ancestors; such irrevocable enemies of science are the common people."
  • Good Omens fits this pretty nicely, since within the book the universe really is about 6000 years old (having been created in 4004 BC), The Bible is pretty literally correct, etc. Scientists aren't exactly portrayed as bad, just kind of pointless. ("The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the palaeontologists haven't seen yet.")
    • Let's not forget that by the end it's been proven that even the immortal creatures who have existed more or less since the dawn of time (the angels and demons) don't really have any idea what's going on either; they're just better at pretending they do. As the book puts it,
      "[God] plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players  1, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."
  • In American Gods one character comments on the pity he feels for confused scientists when they find a skull or skeleton which doesn't quite fit the established patterns in the area. This is because the scientists are completely ignorant of the real reasons these objects are there: Egyptians landed in America thousands of years ago. He insinuates that they will always be incorrect because their scientific reasoning will not allow them to reach this conclusion.
  • Aversion (and possibly deconstruction): Distress by Greg Egan has characters attempting all three originally mentioned attacks on science, and corresponding defenses of science. His repudiation of the notion of science "only being valid for white men in Europe" is given in a speech by a black South African physicist, who points out that what she and all her colleagues have discovered applies equally to every cubic Planck in the observable universe and that logic doesn't care what gonads you have.
  • Scott Adams loves this trope in his written work. See his statements on the paranormal and evolution.
  • In Black Easter, a black magician sends a demon to drive a physicist mad by revealing to him that science is ultimately a meaningless concept.
  • Surprisingly averted in Artemis Fowl. Our current understanding of scientific concepts are wrong, yes, but that's only because we're basing it on our observations, and the Fairies go out of their way to keep us from noticing magic. There's nothing wrong with the scientific method in general.

Live Action TV
  • Arrested Development has this wonderful scene
    Michael: Hey Gob your son came round again.
    Gob: He's not my son.
    Michael: That's not what the DNA tests say.
    Gob: Yes, well, I heard the that the jury is still out on that whole... science thing.

Music
  • The band System Of A Down has this particular gem of pro-spiritual anti-intellectualism in the song Science.
    Science fails to recognize the single most
    Potent element of human existence
    Letting the reigns go to the unfolding
    Is faith, faith, faith, faith
    Science has failed our world
    Science has failed our mother earth
Tabletop RPG
  • In The World Of Darkness sourcebook Second Sight, science is presented not only as being wrong about Psychic Powers, but actively damaging to their activation - scientific scrutiny makes them harder to use. Which is, of course, why no use of psychic ability ever passed the Randi Challenge. To be even more specific, it's not science itself but skepticism which weakens psychic powers, it just unhappily coincides that scientists are the best equipped and inclined to be skeptical. As presented, psychic powers are strengthened in the presence of true believers, but a group of skeptics (or just one who has bought the Merit "Doubting Thomas") can potentially reduce the dice pool and chance of success for a psychic power to 1 in 10.
    • If you can guess the right card even one time in ten over the long run, rather than one time in 52 like everybody else, then you'll still pass Randi's challenge. That's if you're not spending your time getting thrown out of casinos for winning too often, of course.
    • In Hunter: The Vigil, the compact Null Mysteris consists of scientific rationalists devoted to finding answers to supernaturla phenomena that fit established scientific law. They're presented as being horribly misguided. Of course, the Church Militant groups are also shown as doing it wrong...
      • Of course, there ARE scientific approaches to fighting the supernatural in Hunter: the Vigil that are highly effective. Task Force VALKYRIE and The Chioran Group both rely on scientific understanding of the supernatural in order to produce high-tech weaponry or magical surgery. Plus, it's shown that members of Null Mysteris are really on-the-nose (comparatively speaking) on some topics (such as slashers). Null Mysteris being misinformed has more to do with it being a Compact rather than a Conspiracy, as all the Compacts lack professionalism and a firm understanding of the Big Picture.
    • In Genius: The Transgression, Wonders are inherently non-repeatable phenomena, which causes a problem for anyone trying to scientifically test then verify with additional tests. However Geniuses are still trying to create unified theories which rarely end up as anything more than cultural traditions, this might be because mad science is inherently unexplainable but it could just as easily be because Mad Scientists are explicitly not any good at proper science. Sane scientists on the other hand are deliberately kept away from studying mad science otherwise they'll probably turn into mad scientists themselves.
      • However, it's just as explicitly mentioned that Wonders all work within the bounds of scientific principles: for example a Cool Car still needs proper wheels and a proper engine, and they will work on principles similar to normal engines and wheels but they will be much more effective than they "should" be. One has to wonder what scientific basis the magitek time machines hark back too, presumably ones unique the World Of Darkness. Some geniuses will spend the night building a wonder, then the next morning taking it apart to see what they created and how much of it is in fact mundane technology. Then they sell it.
  • An old World of Darkness example, Mage: the Ascension (usually) posits that all Science is Wrong — except when enough people believe that it's not. The Technocracy convinced humanity that science is right during the Enlightenment, though, so mundane reality works on observable principle as long as people believe it does. The whole point of the game is that Awakening allows the True Mage(tm) to flip mundane reality and the collected observers the bird and do things through "discredited" systems of magic/faith/pseudo-science.
  • Ironically, while Exalted exemplifies the trope in the quote listed above (which appears on the back cover of both the first and second edition core rulebooks), the setting itself generally subverts it through heavy use of Magi Tek and Functional Magic. It's not that the setting is unscientific, it's just that it takes place in a world where the Rule Of Cool is encoded into the laws of physics. Most of the setting's most powerful artificers, spellcasters, and thaumaturges are described as having approached their trades with a decidedly scientific mindset.
  • Similarly, the Planescape setting. Science can't really cope with stuff like a spire of infinite length with a city at the top. Since the entire setting runs on Clap Your Hands If You Believe and Your Mind Makes It Real, well... The Guvners are trying to find the laws of the Planes, only there is an opposite faction that believes there aren't any. This complicates matters.
  • In Unknown Armies, science and magic and reality have a very complicated relationship. For the most part, science is completely accurate until it butts up against magic, which is run by Your Mind Makes It Real — magic users are literally so obsessed with their worldview that they impose themselves upon reality. It's also implied that science is only accurate because of Clap Your Hands If You Believe. That is to say, as civilizations rose and people began thinking in more orderly terms, the world settled down into something that can be defined by science, and magic significantly weakened. Modern scientific positivism was basically the death knell for "easy" magic, meaning you now have to be quite insane to actually pull off magic of any real power anymore.
  • Science was wrong in Cthulhu Tech; emphasis on the past tense, there. The discovery of arcanotechnology and the associated theory merely expanded what science knew, to include things like sorcery and the thermodynamics-breaking D-Engine. Of course, these new developments tend to drive researchers crazy, but that's a problem with the human mind, not science.

Theatre
  • There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy. By "philosophy", the Bard meant what we would now call science, which was called "Natural Philosophy" back then.
    • Althought when you think about it, Hamlet responds to seeing his father's alleged ghost logically and scientifically. He suspects that the "apparition" may be a trick. To test it, he devises the whole "Play within a Play" scheme. Claudius's reaction confirms is evidence that the ghost was real.

Web Comics

Web Original
  • Played for laughs in lonelygirl15, in which Bree's Catch Phrase is "Proving science wrong!" She creates a series of videos which purport to disprove scientific theories (but don't).
  • The episodic web-novel Tales Of Mu has this as part of its premise. In fact, it essentially inverts the usual order of things, where the students are in college to study magic but a few of the loners and outsiders dabble in "science" and are made fun of for actually believing the rubbish.
    • It also explains in a couple of places that yes, the rules of magic in that setting do change if you try to pin them down. How anybody nonetheless manages to make magic work in a reliable fashion isn't clear.

Real Life
  • Most Young Earth Creationist beliefs contain varying degrees of this. To be more precise, the YEC model (more or less) rejects abiogenesis, undirected evolution, and a 4.5-billion-year-old earth. In its place, the model has instead a ~6500 year-old universe, in most cases a 7-day long creatio ex nihilio (and assorted processes), each 'kind' of living being created in its own silo. While the YEC model is (purported to be) based on a plain reading and interpretation of Genesis and The Bible in general, it does not reject 'science' or the scientific principle; what it does reject is Science! or scientism. YEC also subordinates scientific hypotheses to what can be rendered consistent with Biblical readings and interpretations. Which does, in many controversial cases, lead to YEC guys crying out loud literally that "Science Is Wrong"... or at least, the hypothesis/model being built is inconsistent with The Bible (which amounts to the same thing).
  • Ben Stein has not only claimed that Science Is Wrong (for not following The Bible) but that Science Is Bad (because it leads to Nazism, apparently). To support this claim, he will provide quotes from Darwin that have sometimes been edited up to 50% in context and which, when read in the original work, say exactly the opposite of what Stein claims.
    • He has also stated that the last time anyone in his family saw a scientist, they were led to a gas chamber. He said this after his movie came out in which he interviewed scientists. Head, meet desk.
    • Stein also conveniently forgets to mention that the works of Charles Darwin were banned in Nazi Germany, and any copies they found were burned. He probably forgot to mention it, because it would instantly render the entire point of his movie gibberish.
  • Believers in the paranormal— Psychic Powers, Alien Abduction, and other New Age ideas— often criticize science for being too closed-minded to accept their "theories".
  • Jack Chick comics frequently carry this message, along with Science Is Bad - believing in evolution makes you not just misguided, but a Nazi!
  • The jury is still out on whether Paul Feyerabend is an example of this trope. On one hand, he heavily criticizes the "scientific method", claiming that scientists give less attention to results that challenge their notions (and even siding with creationists for some time). However, in The Trouble With Physics, Lee Smolin argues that Feyerabend's disdain actually stems from a devouted preoccupation with scientific inquiry.
  • According to Ken Miller, the core reason why Intelligent Design gets support from a few accredited scientists is because if evolution is right, there's apparently no God and morality is just a construct of a society creatures who aren't special in the grand scheme of things, which leads to Jumping Off The Slippery Slope. It should be noted that Miller points out his own faith several times, and is distressed that ID supporters apparently can't give science and faith equal value.
  • Existentialism, in its broadest sense, likewise postulates that "existence precedes essence": things simply exist, but what qualities they have, how they actually relate to each other and us, are all decided by the observer. In this view of reality, science isn't precisely wrong, but it's simply one more way to shuffle the elements of reality around into something that makes sense.
    • But it's also worth noting Samuel Johnson's response to Berkeley's theory that reality only exists in the mind: he said "I refute it thus" and then kicked a rock with his foot. Whatever the true nature of science and reality, assuming it's real seems to be the only way of actually getting through life.
  • Here's also pragmatic view which boils down to "science only provides abstract models that can be adequate or not for specific use  2, and strives to refine them". It runs from Helmholtz's assertion that casuality principle is appliable only to description of experiment, but not to experiment itself, just like all other logical laws, and thus cannot be experimentally disproved to Zinoviev's statement that sciences describe not "what", but "how" is going on and that proper theory is always true in specific set of conditions which is never completely fullfilled in reality.  3 From this point of view any "right or wrong" or "which one is right" question is simply meaningless.
    • How is that pragmatic?
  • Scientologists believe psychology and psychiatry are wrong as a tenent of their faith.
    • Actually they seem to believe that practitioners thereof are all involved in a conspiracy to destroy the earth or some such. This troper (a practicing clinical psychologist) suspects L. Ron Hubbard was once told he was a sociopath and took offence.
  • Played with by paranormalist author Charles Fort, who spent most of the 1920s and 1930s cataloging various accounts of "damned things," or phenomena which "science" categorically explains away as nothing of any significance. These included topics like Psychic Powers, spontaneous combustion, teleportation, and many other similar matters. However, as Fort himself wrote, he didn't believe anything he wrote of, but merely felt that everything we take for granted (religion, politics, scientific positivism) should be questioned constantly to keep them vital and relevant (a position Robert Anton Wilson would come to describe as "ideal skepticism"). His followers, however, have an unfortunate tendency to go a bit off the deep end and end up being the kind of people who think "open-minded" equals "you must accept my crazy theories about aliens molesting livestock and people for genetic experiments."
  • Post-modernism and post-structuralism are philosophical movements that reject any kind of firm, immutable truth. Science at its best is an incomplete description of an observation made using flawed tools, and at its worst, a dogmatic inquisition that locks up heretics guilty of blaspheming Reality under the designation "mental illness".
    • Which is odd, because while science is actively looking for immutable truths, scientists haven't claimed to know any in a long time.
      • Scientists aren't. Lay followers of science, on the other hand, like to claim they have.

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