Great conversation, interesting book review and great responses.
Alex, i thought the "wrong... about ALMOST everything" was the publisher's suggestion and not your original choice.
however, given that much - I was intrigued by the frame - yes, science is fundamentally wrong, but it's still right about things like gravity.
Yes, that's true - but what it's "right" about appears so overwhelming to so many because they (we?) are not aware of the vast almost infinite inner reaches of the universe.
As a psychologist who has conducted psychological research and has studied Sri Aurobindo for 40 years (and meditated that long too), I can tell you, conventional academic psychologists know almost nothing about the mind or consciousness, and if recent reports of failure to replicate are even remotely accurate, more and more people are starting to see this.
if you think medicine is a science, you have to figure - if physiological scientists can't even agree on whether coffee (chocolate, hi fat, lo fat, hi carbs, lo carbs, etc etc etc etc) are good or bad for you - are we really going to trust them in more complex areas such as evolutionary biology?
And physics - what information about the universe do you get from physics? Eddington said it beautifully: pointer readings. Numbers, complete abstractions, the triumph of the abstracting left hemisphere. As an earlier commenter said, it's "correct" it's valuable but it's utterly trivial.
So technically speaking, or perhaps, "strictly" speaking - Alex is exactly right - science is "wrong" about "ALMOST" everything (it gets superficial measurements, like the one about gravity quoted above, correct, but you know what? so what. The materialist will yell at me and say, "WELL THEN STOP USING YOUR COMPUTER" and my response will be, get me some land outside of Asheville and help me learn to grow my own produce and i'l be happy to stop:>))
I'll let Sri Aurobindo have the last word. This is from a letter he wrote to a disciple in the early 1930s:
The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes and the outer knowledge Science organises takes its real and very limited place. Science, like most mental and external knowledge, gives you only truth of process.
I would add that it cannot give you even the whole truth of process; for you seize some of the ponderables, but miss the all-important imponderables; you get, hardly even the how, but the conditions under which things happen in Nature.
After all the triumphs and marvels of Science the explaining principle, the rationale, the significance of the whole is left as dark, as mysterious and even more mysterious than ever. [Note: this is the part where I think it's legitimate to say science is "wrong" - it makes the world less comprehensible, not more so] The scheme it has built up of the evolution not only of this rich and vast and variegated material world, but of life and consciousness and mind and their workings out of a brute mass of electrons, identical and varied only in arrangement and number, is an irrational magic more baffling than any the most mystic imagination could conceive.
Science in the end lands us in a paradox effectuated, an organised and rigidly determined accident, an impossibility that has somehow happened,– it has shown us a new, a material Maya, aghaṭana-ghaṭana-paṭīyasī, very clever at bringing about the impossible, a miracle that cannot logically be and yet somehow is there actual, irresistibly organised, but still irrational and inexplicable.
And this is evidently because Science has missed something essential; it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and in a way how it has happened, but it has shut its eyes to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust of manageable and utilisable appearance.
It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance and circles of the Lila. I say “begin” because theDivine Reality is not so simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it into a single formula; it is the Infinite and opens before you an infinite knowledge to which all Science put together is a bagatelle.
But still you do touch the essential, the eternal behind things and in the light of That all begins to be profoundly luminous, intimately intelligible.