

But there are new troubles in the peculiar form of paradise that science has created, as well as new questions about whether it has the popular support to meet the future challenges of disease, pollution, security, energy, education, food, water and urban sprawl.

The public seems increasingly intolerant of grand, technical fixes, even while it hungers for new gadgets and drugs. It has also come to fear the potential consequences of unfettered science and technology in areas like genetic engineering, germ warfare, global warming, nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear arms.

Tension between science and the public has thrown up new barriers to research involving deadly pathogens, stem cells and human cloning. Some of the doubts about science began with the environmental movement of the 1960's.

''The bloom has been coming off the rose since 'Silent Spring,' '' said Dr. John H. Gibbons, President Bill Clinton's science adviser, of Rachel Carson's 1962 book on the ravages of DDT. Until then, he said, ''People thought of science as a cornucopia of goodies. Now they have to choose between good and bad.''

''The urgency,'' he said, ''is to re-establish the fundamental position that science plays in helping devise uses of knowledge to resolve social ills. I hope rationality will triumph. But you can't count on it. As President Chirac said, we've lost the primacy of reason.''

Science has also provoked a deeper unease by disturbing traditional beliefs. Some scientists, stunned by the increasing vigor of fundamentalist religion worldwide, wonder if old certainties have rushed into a sort of vacuum left by the inconclusiveness of science on the big issues of everyday life.

''Isn't it incredible that you have so much fundamentalism, retreating back to so much ignorance?'' remarked Dr. George A. Keyworth II, President Ronald Reagan's science adviser.

The disaffection can be gauged in recent opinion surveys. Last month, a Harris poll found that the percentage of Americans who saw scientists as having ''very great prestige'' had declined nine percentage points in the last quarter-century, down to 57 from 66 percent. Another recent Harris poll found that most Americans believe in miracles, while half believe in ghosts and a third in astrology -- hardly an endorsement of scientific rationality.

''There's obviously a kind of national split personality about these things,'' said Dr. Owen Gingerich, a historian of astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who speaks often of his Christian faith.

''Science gives you very cold comfort at times of death or sickness or so on,'' Dr. Gingerich said.

In this atmosphere of ambivalence, research priorities have become increasingly politicized, some scientists say.

''Right now it's about as bad as I've known it,'' said Dr. Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist who has advised the federal government on national security issues for more than 40 years.

As the world marches into a century born amid fundamentalist strife in oil-producing nations, a divisive political climate in the United States and abroad and ever more sophisticated challenges to scientific credos like Darwin's theory of evolution, it seems warranted to ask a question that runs counter to centuries of Western thought: Does science matter? Do people care about it anymore?

The Context

Breakthroughs And Disenchantment

Clearly, science has mattered a lot, for a long time. Advances in food, public health and medicine helped raise life expectancy in the United States in the past century from roughly 50 to 80 years. So too, world population between 1950 and 1990 more than doubled, now exceeding six billion. Biology discovered the structure of DNA, made test-tube babies and cured diseases. And the decoding of the human genome is leading scientists toward a detailed understanding of how the body works, offering the hope of new treatments for cancer and other diseases.

''For a lot of people, life has gotten better,'' said Dr. James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix. ''You don't know what it was like in 1950. It wasn't just the dreariness of Bing Crosby that made life tough.''

In physics, breakthroughs produced digital electronics and subatomic discoveries. American rocket science won the space race, put men on the moon, probed distant planets and lofted hundreds of satellites, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

But major problems also arose: acid rain, environmental toxins, the Bhopal chemical disaster, nuclear waste, global warming, the ozone hole, fears over genetically modified food and the fiery destruction of two space shuttles, not to mention the curse of junk e-mail. Such troubles have helped feed social disenchantment with science.

When the cold war ended, the physical sciences began to lose luster and funding. After spending $2 billion, Congress killed physicists' pre-eminent endeavor, the Superconducting Super Collider, an enormous particle accelerator.

''Suddenly, Congress wasn't interested in science anymore,'' said Fred Jerome, a science policy analyst at the New School.