Many scientists seem to suffer from an inferiority complex. They often feel they are objects of suspicion, or under-appreciated. As a result, some have taken to declaring that the benefits of modern living, brought to you by science, show the discipline is all-powerful, an inside track on the truth about everything in the universe.
This always seemed a foolish path. Now evidence has emerged that it could be dangerous, too. A week ago, a team of physicists produced research that suggests we might have underestimated the lifetime of any black holes produced at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Previous calculations had suggested the LHC might produce microscopic black holes, but that they would last just fractions of a second. This would give them no time to grow to a significant, potentially dangerous size.
The new analysis, carried out by physicists at the Universities of Bologna and Alabama, says the black holes could last for seconds, maybe minutes. Though the scientists' conclusion is that "the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible", the revision is still slightly unsettling.
And let me give you a little more cause for concern. Claims for the LHC's safety were based partly on analysis of the theories that describe the consequences of particle collisions. According to Cern's safety paper, there is around a one in a billion chance of a "dangerous" event in any given year of operation. However, Toby Ord and his colleagues at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute have shown that around one in a thousand scientific papers has fatal flaws in its reasoning or results.
That means the tiny theoretical probability of a dangerous event at the LHC ought to be adjusted to take account of the probability of the theory being wrong, or at least wrongly applied in this analysis. We have no way of telling what that second probability is. Add that to the possibility of long-lived black holes, and the theoretical safety of the LHC is starting to look a little less robust.
Welcome to science in the real world: it is messy, inconclusive and subject to revision. As Lord May, former chief scientific adviser to the government once said, science is best represented as "organised scepticism" - and science's results and conclusions have to be included in that scepticism. Science is not the arbiter of truth. All it can do is offer opinions about the answers to certain questions that we ask of nature. And it reserves the right to revise those opinions in the light of future discoveries.
Even mathematics loses touch with any notion of truth once it steps into the real world. Last May, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany, warned that financial systems were operating in dangerous territory because traders were transferring their naive notions of the truth of mathematics on to the "black box" models used to predict and control trading. A few months later, we all found out just how dangerous that territory was.
When the stakes are high, we do better to trust the results of experiments rather than guesstimates arising from theoretical considerations. Fortunately, nature has provided just the experiments we need to evaluate the likely effects of the LHC. Particles collide in the upper atmosphere every day, with much higher energies than the LHC will muster, and they have never caused a catastrophe. If that's enough for you to consider the LHC safe - as it is for me - breathe easy. Just don't blame me if something does go wrong. I'm only human. And so is science.
Michael Brooks, a consultant for New Scientist and author of 13 Things That Don't Make Sense.