What if our money celebrated science instead of Presidents?

There are two things which come to my mind:

  1. It neglects the impact of other disciplines: while science has had a tremendous impact on society as a whole, both in terms of progress and hope, it also has its shortcomings. Science is the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. The key words here are "natural world" and "experiment". How can science tell us what we ought to do (morality)? How can science tell us what is the nature of a number? Could science ever tell us why law and morality should be separated (or united)? What about mathematical truths? how do we empirically prove that there is an infinite amount of prime numbers? To put it simply, science does not and cannot encompass all knowledge we have. So why privilege science when there are other disciplines that can give us other kinds of knowledge that science never will? Re-designing bills as "science worship" not only gives us a false impression of what science can do, but it also neglects other disciplines which are crucial to our understanding of the world and ourselves, e.g. philosophy, art, music, politics, etc.

  2. The blind worship of science is not only misleading, it is also dangerous: seeing science as the ultimate source of progress has characterised the thinking of the Enlightenment period and the next hundred years that followed it. Today we understand that while science can bring us wonderful things (medicine, technology, internet), it can also bring total destruction if left unchecked (eugenics, nuclear weapons, chemical warfare). While putting scientific progress on US dollar bills may not be "worship", it puts above humans an idea (scientism) which can have devastating consequences if left unchecked by humans.

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