What bugs me is the complete ignorance scientists have of what history does to popular thinking. It could be that the science we are doing today will be fully accepted two thousand years from now (if we last that long), but it's also possible (in my opinion) that the science of today will seem to be amusingly prejudiced and conceited.
I also said 'rarely' in what I wrote to you earlier. But, even so, unless the cosmos changes its current structure fairly drastically, no foreseeable future science is going to find that Newton's law of gravity doesn't do a fairly decent job of predicting how freely falling objects in a fairly weak gravitational field behave. Similarly, as Feynman wrote somewhere, in 40,000 years the only thing that will be remembered from the 19th century on Earth (if there's anybody around to remember, that is) will be Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, which, again, is a quite accurate theory of how electricity and magnetism behave so long as the energies aren't too large and the distances over which the interactions take place aren't too short.
You must remember that the scientific method is a very young thing (a few centuries old). And yet, even in its short period of existence, it has produced remarkable results. Not that there's not more to know, of course...
No question. But I also see scientists make some pretty outrageous remarks about the "little people" who refuse to give up their misconceptions. There was an amusing flurry in American Spectator in which a letter writer claimed that the belief in Intelligent Design would end all scientific query. The letter quoted Newton who it just so happens, believed in intelligent design (no caps). I could easily see a future in which it was proven and accepted that there is intelligence embedded in all of creation and was accepted and proven scientific fact. Regarding the people who try to force it into schools, it's premature to say the least! Let them keep working on intelligent design. If they come up with something indisputable and provable then it will come to be accepted and the more hysterical Darwinists will be the ridiculed ones.