The difference between science and woo-woo is that science works without preconditions. Science eventually turns into technology which makes outcomes easy.
This is an interesting part of our western narrative of science and technology. Science gives technology, technology works thereby proving science. I really recomend The Golem at Large: What You Should Know About Technology: Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch: Books for an in-depth look at that relationship.
The short version as I recall it (I read it years ago, my apologies in advance to Collina and Pinch) is that technological development mostly works with different methods then scientific research. The goal is not understanding, but improving the tech which is often done from an in-depth understanding of specific - not general - properties. New technology therefore gives incentive to develop the general theories to explain the tech and perhaps develop it further. Do read the book, it is well written and full of interesting stories about drilling for oil in Sweden, US-Israel missile cooperation and english economists.
It took somewhere around a century between Watts steam-engine (which was nto the first, but an improvement) and Joules theories that explained how it worked. We have cut significant time since then, but the general model stays the same. Medicine is mostly technology in this sense, it is less about the general explanations and more about finding methods that work. Same with finding truffels. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
I can plug a TOSLINK cable into my Mac, wire it up to a DAC, and get music out of it. I don't need to know about semiconductor band gaps, optical transmittivity, coding protocols, dither, or clock jitter.
Assuming I have the very basic level of knowledge needed to understand that I'm supposed to plug it into a DAC and not my ear, and as long as something isn't broken, it will just work for me.
Obviously if you're an engineer it's your job to know more, and to understand how to wave dead chickens and oscilloscopes around. But if you do your properly most people won't need to get that hands-on.
Woo woo tends not to be that reliable. Sometimes interesting, surprising, exotic and baffling things happen, but just as often nothing significant happens at all.
Maybe if we had a unified theory of woo woo it would work reliably. Or maybe it's perpetually liminal and just doesn't work like that.
No one knows. Camps on both sides assume they do, but really they don't at all.
