> the public is being brainwashed into thinking that science is more important than creative endeavors 1. They aren't. 2. Science is a creative endeavour. 3.

> the public is being brainwashed into thinking that science is more important than creative endeavors 1. They aren't. 2. Science is a creative endeavour. 3. If people believe that science is more important than creative endeavours then perhaps it's because science has brought us machines that allow us to fly, little magic boxes you can carry in your pocket that let you talk to someone thousands of miles away, the ability to have sex with a reasonable confidence of not making babies, other little pocket-sized boxes that will capture and replay highly realistic moving pictures, large bridges that don't fall down, people walking on the fucking moon, devices that can see into your body and tell whether you have cancer, other devices that can kill the cancer inside your body if so, things cheap enough for almost everyone to own that will let you travel five times faster than a fast runner for long distances, etc., etc., etc. What you call "creative endeavours" have produced wonderful things too, but if I had to choose between Hamlet and antibiotics I'll go for the millions of lives saved. > Why is nature more interesting than the human imagination? More interesting? Well, that's a separate question. To many people it isn't. Those to whom it is have all sorts of different reasons. One would be that nature has a lot more in it than the human imagination. ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy", as one of those creative types made one of his characters say -- though he meant something else.) Another would be that human imagination is limited by, well, human imagination, whereas nature is full of things that no one could have guessed. The moon is kept in its orbit by the same thing that makes an apple fall? Space and time are the same thing, and it's all curved? Light travels from A to B by taking every possible path from A to B and interfering with itself? These things, to someone who's thought about them enough to know what they mean, are astonishing. > playing a lottery that they will discover something huge I think you may have bought into the common misconception that all scientific progress is the result of occasional geniuses making huge leaps by the sheer power of their enormous brains. It doesn't really work that way. The advance of science is a collective endeavour; even if you never discover anything huge, you're contributing to it. (And: why would someone become an artist, musician or author, essentially playing a lottery that they will create something wonderful even though such creations are extremely rare? Most books are unpublishably bad. Most published books are pretty weak. Even of the best published, most will probably be almost completely forgotten in ten years. -- And, again, there's nothing wrong with that: even a not-so-great artistic work enriches the world. And so it is with science.)