Letter : Old model

To call science an unnatural mode of thought is to confuse its methods with its content which, granted, is often counter-intuitive (Lewis Wolpert, Review, 9 March). In its use of inference, observation and imagination, and testing by reason and evidence, science is only a more rigorous form of everyday thinking. Nature may be value-free, but the picture science creates is a construction from a human perspective: selective and partial.

Why can't he see that science is possible at the level of appearances, as in social science, art or technology, and can be just as scientific in its method and surprising in its explanations as at the level of the unobservable atom? His obsolete model alienates the uninitiated and drives them further into the arms of superstition.

Mandy Tango

Epsom, Surrey