I can see now why you are so misled. Science is a way of thinking, it's not about knowing how to make neat stuff.

The Japanese swordsmiths have been making the finest steel blades in the world for a thousand years. But they haven't a clue how they do it (or at least, they didn't until fairly recently). Their skills developed by trial and error and were transmitted by tradition and repetition. This is craftsmanship, engineering, and even high art, but it is not science.

Science is about learning how the world works. This can lead to clever engineering, which in turn can help build instruments to study nature better, but there is a fundamental difference between science and engineering. Engineers want to solve a specific problem. Scientists want to understand physical reality. There is a lot of feedback between the two, and a lot of overlap; engineers need to know a lot of science nowadays, and scientists need to sometimes devise their own technology for their research. But they are not in the same business. Their philosophy is different, and even their personalities.

Humans are wired to be engineers, they have a natural aptitude for it. And the great civilizations of antiquity all produced great engineering works. Even stone age cultures developed technologies that were not matched by scientific European societies for thousands of years (Eskimo clothing and Polynesian sailing craft are two examples that immediately come to mind). But science has a historical beginning and a development which can be traced through history. It appears to have been a one-shot deal and does not seem to have arisen independently in a number of places. Some civilizations, like the Romans and the Chinese, developed extremely sophisticated technologies without formal scientific methods but they all eventually reached a point where they could go no further. This suggests that science might not have arisen except by accident, and if it is ever lost as a philosophy, it may never come back.

Even the origins of scientific thought give no assurance that it can ever be recovered if lost. Why did the handful of Greek city-states scattered around and across the Mediterranean sea lead to such an explosion of original thought 2500 years ago? What happened there? I don't know, no one knows, but it did. And it never happened anywhere else. And if that knowledge had never been preserved and transmitted to the future, human civilization after the Dark Ages might have recovered to a state comparable to the Romans or the Chinese. But we would have gone no farther.

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I had a friend who was a physicist and worked at NASA in Florida. His team had a friendly rivalry with a group of engineers who worked nearby, and they often were challenged by the engineers who would ship over a piece of equipment with a note saying "How does it work?", or "It's broken, can you fix it?". Very often, the physicists could not answer those simple questions.

After being shown up by the engineers several times, they finally decided to get even. They sent a piece of equipment to the engineers with a note pinned to it saying "What does it do?"