“Science is not what they say..” a Scientist’s Intellectual Humility

Science is not what they say, so serious

The truth being what you imagine

Not what you see

And not something useful

Or something that pays

Rebecca Elson was an astonishingly gifted scientist, a researcher of "dark matter" and "globular clusters", an astronomer deeply involved in the Hubble project, researcher at the Harvard Centre for Astrophysics and the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, and one of the most imaginatives scientific minds of her generation. Her book Responsibility to Awe remains for me a precious book, containing her poems, fragments and an autobiographical essay that is both positive and poignant. She died in 1999 at the age of 39.

And it is such a person, of such rare intellectual curiosity and critical generosity, who wrote the lines above – unfinished, unpunctuated and all the more impressive as a statement of science as the servant of human flourishing, not its master, and a vision of knowledge that allows for more than utility and profit, the two wings of technological power. for