The Litvinenko murder brought to mind an old sophomoric debate that floated among my acquaintances for some time.
The physical sciences enable killing. That is their core realism, that scientific knowledge is real in so far as it can be applied to kill.
The philosophy of science has an interesting history and an infuriatingly inconclusive current status.
Operationally, a lot of scientists go through their daily tasks under naive realism assumptions, yet when pressed the case for realism is no better than it ever was, or at least it still has the old flaws that undermined it.
Many years ago, over many beers, a conclusion was reached: that operationally science is realistic in so far as scientific discoveries (in the physical sciences) enable causation of death, of humans.
Not that such is their purpose, rather it is the sophomoric extension of the old "don't believe in gravity, go step off a cliff".
It is useful in that there is truth to it. If you have a correct model for a physical process, then it can, ultimately, be used to trigger a way to kill. If the model is wrong, if reality does not correspond, then it does not work.
Hence Po-210 can be made and purified and used to kill.
This is clearly grossly oversimplified, if nothing else you run straight into Schrödinger's Cat and probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics, yet the argument retains a certain elegant but cruel truth.
Curiously, this is also the feature that at most times in most cultures was most desired of religion: the deity was called upon to smite enemies and kill others; as a refinement the ability to reverse or undo death was also valued, as was any ability of deities to extend life beyond apparent death.
Even now, the key tenets of most major faiths center on the implied promise of transcending death, and grown men in positions of authority still reduce policies in the world arena to "my god can kick your god's butt", with none of the eloquence or elegance of Athena or Apollo scheming like petulant five year olds.
So... can we turn the argument around? If we take a scientific endeavour which cannot make a model or prediction which can be used to kill with some fidelity, then is it really science?
If in doubt, call upon Everett.
In the meantime, taking our favourite fun hypothesis - can string theory make any quantitative or qualitative prediction such that we could take the result of some observation or experiment and use it in some Rube Goldberg device to trigger a death (or other consequence) with any predictable reliability?
If not, is it science, yet?
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So astronomy is not one of the physical sciences, then? Or cosmology?
Astro and cosmology are physical sciences because they make strong quantitative predictions that are measurable.
eg I could set up a microwave detector and after running the input through some well prescribed filters to take out milky way and zodiacal foreground, set it up so that if and only if the characteristic temperature of the residual signal is at least 2.5 K but no more than 3 K as determined by spatially averaged measurements at three different frequencies then and only then a Evil Doomsday device will be triggered.
Similarly, I could, for example, set up such devices that detonated if and only if a certain star dimmed by at least 0.1% for a certain interval of time at a pre-specified time; or if the spacing of radio pulses from a certain source in the sky shifted by a pre-calculated amount at a definite predicted time.
Those of course are some of the most precise predictable observations, but in general both fields do make a number of repeatable, testable predictions that can be measured and the result of the observations can be used to effect some other physical process.
It harks back to the Michaelson-Morley experiment, from which we eventually concluded that if you can't detect an effect, it might as well not exist. That's why I was never afraid of ghosts. I figured that if they could have an effect on me, I could have an effect on them.
Yup, but it goes a level beyond that.
We can set up a device using a M-M interferometer, so that if the result is null, then the Ultimate Evil Doomsday device is triggered... null results work just fine.
So... if we're worried about ghosts, a scientific null prediction would be to set up the Ultimate Evil Doomsday device, so that it will be triggered unless a ghost stops it from being triggered. If only someone will tell us the properties of ghosts so we can set it up.
Seriously - say someone thinks a house is haunted, and this is manifested at midnight when a sudden chill comes over the family room.
Ok, we rig a bomb that will blow up the house unless the temperature in that room drops at midnight. We'll even let the ghost believers do base runs with no bombs to get the predicted temperature drop...
Be interesting to see how many would take such a bet.