> But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work?
The author asks the question, but then never answers it. That isn't surprising -- nearly no one outside science understands how it works.
* Science rejects authority and doubts expertise. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.
* The basic scientific posture is that a theory is assumed to be false until proven true.
* Contrast this outlook with pseudoscience, where a theory is assumed to be true until proven false.
* A conscientious scientist lists all the reasons his theory might be wrong. In other fields, this task is left to critics.
This summary may seem to be at odds with modern scientific practice, but that's because much of modern scientific publishing is not science, it's marketing.
In a now-famous science story, during an astronomy conference a researcher stood up and confessed that he had made a mistake -- his detection of an exoplanet actually resulted from a failure to subtract Earth's own annual motion from his data.
The audience came to its feet and gave the researcher a standing ovation.
The author asks the question, but then never answers it. That isn't surprising -- nearly no one outside science understands how it works.
* Science rejects authority and doubts expertise. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.
* The basic scientific posture is that a theory is assumed to be false until proven true.
* Contrast this outlook with pseudoscience, where a theory is assumed to be true until proven false.
* A conscientious scientist lists all the reasons his theory might be wrong. In other fields, this task is left to critics.
This summary may seem to be at odds with modern scientific practice, but that's because much of modern scientific publishing is not science, it's marketing.
In a now-famous science story, during an astronomy conference a researcher stood up and confessed that he had made a mistake -- his detection of an exoplanet actually resulted from a failure to subtract Earth's own annual motion from his data.
The audience came to its feet and gave the researcher a standing ovation.
That is science.