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I saw Galileo again last night and came away even more strongly moved by what seems to me Brecht's core insight about science, as relevant in Galielo's time as in Brecht's and our own: "what is important about being a scientist isn't one's product (which someone else might create) but one's willingness to stand up for the importance of doubting, to resist any effort to get people to settle for existing understandings from whatever authority."

Yes, scientists need to resist institutional/cultural forces that attempt to prevent them from carrying out research that would challenge authority (whether religious, political,, or economic). But, even more importantly, scientists need to resist selling their own souls by failing to encouage others to challenge authority, including that of scientists themselves.

"Unhappy is the land that needs a hero"

"That obligation being to insist, at all times and all places, that knowledge is only won through doubt ... I hold it that the only proper goal of science is to relieve the miseries of human existence. If scientists, cut off from the masses by selfish rulers, seek merely to heap up knowledge for its own sake, then science is a cripple and your new inventions will merely bring new drudgeries ... the steadfastness of one man could have challenged everything, for the benefit of everybody ... If I had resisted, maybe scientists would have pledged themselves to apply their knowledge soley for the human good. As it now stands, all we have is a race of moral midgets, who can be hired out by the hour to anyone."

"We must take care of science's light/Guard it, keep it, use it right/In case it proves a flame to all/Downwards, to consume us all."

"Isn't it high time we broke the yoke/That binds us to our Lords and Masters?"

Brecht clearly understood what science is capable of as a contributor to human culture, and equally understood the kinds of barriers, cultural and personal, that could get in the way of science living up to that potential. Are we doing better, can we?

Maybe. If we keep at it. After all ... "We're really just at the beginning."