certainly, so far as prestige is concerned, science has made
great advances at the expense of philosophy and theology:
that much is a commonplace. But is the change as great as it
seems? Are people really no longer interested in all those
serious topics which preoccupied their ancestors, finding
themselves absorbed instead in some quite different set of
problems? Or are the same old cargoes being carried (so to
speak) in fresh bottoms, under a new flag? What answer we
give to that question depends on this: how far the problems
the man-in-the-street expects the scientist to solve for him are
ones about which a scientist is specially qualified to speak. So
before we are too impressed by the change it is worth asking
whether, when we turn to works of popular science, the
questions we are interested in are always genuinely scientific
ones. I think this is only partly so, and in what follows I shall
try to show why. Often enough, we tend to ask too much of
science, and to read into the things the scientist tells us implica-
tions that are not there -- which in the nature of the case cannot
be there; drawing from scraps of information about, for
instance, physics, conclusions which no amount of physics
could by itself establish. Sometimes our questions are clearly
the same as those that the eighteenth-century theologians
tackled: a discussion about free-will is none the less about free-
will for bringing in Heisenberg's 'uncertainty relation'. But
more often we are unaware of what we are doing, and turn to
the scientist as to an expert, an authority, even when he is
entitled to no more than a private opinion.

Quite a lot of popular science books encourage us in this,
and present these opinions as the latest results of scientific
research. Their authors do not confine themselves to explain-
ing some scientific investigation, some novel theory or dis-
covery about phenomena which had previously not been
understood. They go on to do something more, something
different, something which can hardly be called science at all.
As a result there has grown up a sort of scientific harlequinade
in the shape of an independent body of ideas which play a
considerable part in the layman's picture of science, but in
science proper none at all. The Running-Down Universe,

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