Science has nothing to do with common sense

I first came across Simon Singh through his book on cryptography, which I even gifted to a visiting scholar--this was back in California. In that book, Singh presented a fantastic story on how much the lock/key had become sophisticated over time, all the way to the "https" that we routinely encounter now.  Of course, Singh's name and heritage was an added bonus--to make it that much more of a "Indian" connection.

A couple of years ago, Singh was sued because of his comments in the Guardian about chiropractic claims--he was examining the science behind them. Thankfully, he did not back down and won the case.  Wired talked to him about this, where Singh makes this important distinction between science and "common sense:"

Science has nothing to do with common sense. I believe it was Einstein who said that common sense is a set of prejudices we form by the age of 18. Inject somebody with some viruses and that’s going to keep you from getting sick? That’s not common sense. We evolved from single-cell organisms? That’s not common sense. By driving my car I’m going to cook Earth? None of this is common sense. The commonsense view is what we’re fighting against. So somehow you’ve got to move people away from that with these quite complicated scientific arguments based on even more complicated research. That’s why it’s such an uphill battle. People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth.

Yes, we need a lot more Simon Singhs in this world.