> 1900-1950 brought us from iceboxes, horse-and-buggy and kerosene lamps, to electric everything, two cars in every driveway, refrigeration, television, radio, supersonic airplanes, weapons of unbelievable destruction.
These are mostly not scientific, but engineering breakthroughs (a lot of the science necessary for it was developed long before).
> Then there was the space race, putting men on the Moon, sending probes to other planets, and it looked like the wildest science fiction might be in reach. Then... stagnation.
Which shows that science works/worked pretty well, just the society/economy to back it was too weak. For me a really strong pro-science argument.
> For the most part, today we have the same things we had thirty or forty years ago, just incrementally better or more efficient
Bullshit: Try to use a computer or cell phone that was built 30 or 40 years ago.
> These are mostly not scientific, but engineering breakthroughs (a lot of the science necessary for it was developed long before).
That's reasonable. But the public sees the whole stack re: technology/engineering/science as the same thing. If something stalls in one part, it affects the other two.
Come to think of it: any undiagnosed failure in the education system could easily lead to a broad stagnation, so it is certainly hard to tease these things apart and allocate blame.
> Which shows that science works/worked pretty well, just the society/economy to back it was too weak. For me a really strong pro-science argument.
Supposing that you are right. Why then does society/economy remain too weak to fully back the science? What is the grit in the gears?
> Bullshit: Try to use a computer or cell phone that was built 30 or 40 years ago.
I think we are, certainly I am, excluding progress in computer science. That's the one general area of brightness.
Whether that's enough to counteract weakness in cheap energy production/storage, biotechnology and medicine, spaceflight (until very recently), effective transport etc, is another thing.
These are mostly not scientific, but engineering breakthroughs (a lot of the science necessary for it was developed long before).
> Then there was the space race, putting men on the Moon, sending probes to other planets, and it looked like the wildest science fiction might be in reach. Then... stagnation.
Which shows that science works/worked pretty well, just the society/economy to back it was too weak. For me a really strong pro-science argument.
> For the most part, today we have the same things we had thirty or forty years ago, just incrementally better or more efficient
Bullshit: Try to use a computer or cell phone that was built 30 or 40 years ago.