Science Doesn't Know It All

New Scientist has up an article on 13 known phenomena which show that modern science does not have all the answers. There are a number of wierd and anti-intuitive features of modern science (quantum mechanics, anyone?) but these are mysteries which completely are contrary to known phenomena.

Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away...This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

That is just one example. The others are even more interesting, though not quite so close to home. This is the kind of article that makes me smile. Every generation, someone says that the end of science is near. Every generation is wrong.