I have recently been conversing via email with a bona fide crackpot. He initially wanted me to clear up some of his misconceptions about relativity (which I am always quite happy to do). However, this somehow lead to me agreeing to read his book in which he talks at great length about his theory which purports to unite "Western Physics" with "Eastern Metaphysics". I got to about halfway through the second chapter (which seems to consist of a number of anecdotal examples of paranormal phenomena) before I gave up due to all the inaccuracies, misunderstandings, fallacious arguments, outright lies and attacks on "the standard theory of physics". I hope my latest reply to him wasn't too rude - despite his dull book he seems to be a nice guy and I suspect there may be some interesting ideas in there if I had the patience to wade through all the pseudo-scientific rubbish.
However, this experience did get me thinking about the nature of science. Many of these crackpots seem to be under the impression that there is some kind of "scientific establishment" who spend their days in ivory towers, who have a kind of stranglehold on science, who deliberately mislead (and withhold things from) people outside "the scientific establishment", who are very closed-minded to ideas which challenge "established theory" and who often apparently have some sort of personal vendetta against the crackpots.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Science is not some closed-off world inaccessible to those without a degree in it. Science is simply the process of thinking up theories, performing experiments to test those theories and then throwing away the theories that are disproved by experiment. That's all there is to it. According to this definition, we all practice science every day without even thinking about it. Whenever you think to yourself "gee, it's cold in here, I wonder if the heating's switched off" and then go and check the thermostat, you are performing science. Whenever you try the handle of your car's door after locking it to make sure it's really locked, you are performing science. That's all there is to it - no degree required and no panel of "experts" judging the worth of your theories.
Is science correct? Well, it depends what you mean by "correct". If by correct you mean "a complete and perfect theory of absolutely everything that happens in the universe", then no, it is not correct, and never can be - the results of the next experiment could always falsify the previous theories. But if by "correct" you mean "useful", then the correctness of science is undeniable - just look at all the technology we have developed as a result of the science we have done. If science wasn't a useful way of finding out about the universe and modelling it, we would never have developed these technologies and I would not be able to communicate with you like this.
So what about the phenomena that have been documented but are not explained by science, just as the power of prayer in healing, or extra-sensory perception? The trouble with these phenomena is that they are very difficult to do experiments on. Partly because of the huge number of fakers purporting to do such things for profit (in which cases the effects tend to disappear in carefully controlled, double blind experiments), and partly because such phenomena tend to require people to be involved in an active role, which makes the experiments time consuming and expensive to repeat a large number of times. You can't just set up a machine one time and then leave it running a million times to examine the effects of "the power of prayer" or "astrology", nor can you do these experiments on animals as we do for biological experiments.
This means that science applied to human beings proceeds much more slowly (and is much further behind) science applied to quarks, polymer chains or lab rats. So, when effects such as the placebo effect or the power of prayer in healing are observed, we don't have any working theories to explain such things. In time, as more experiments are done, I believe that we will have theories to explain any repeatable experimental result, but where human beings are concerned we must be patient - we can't just give up on science and say that these phenomena are unexplainable or can only be explained by invoking your preferred brand of God or aliens or flying spaghetti monsters. Of course, maybe one of those is the explanation, in which case science will determine this once all simpler theories (of which there are a lot) have been proved wrong by experiment. Thinking up theories isn't the bottleneck here, it's the experiments that are the bottleneck. A good experiment is hard to do right.
Also, scientists tend to be some of the people most open minded to new ideas. Most scientists would, I think, like nothing more than for something to be discovered that completely overturns the known laws of physics - it would make for some very exciting times and provide lots of opportunities for interesting new research.