I keep finding salutes to science. I like science but it isn't a pure temple of wonderful reasoning. The modern idea of searching for evidence to support our theories seems a clear advance and has paid off many times. Still the idea of what is evidence for or against something is not always cut-and-dried. Any piece of evidence can often be used to support different, sometimes opposing, claims.
Like it or not, there are fashions in our thinking. We cannot pay attention to everything and as we discover more facts, more truths, more principles, more connections, the range of things a single individual can master, even grasp, even understand, shrinks by comparison. You hear about S.T.E.M. classes, training, emphases, majors, occupations. Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics are wonderful fields but we all want a little love and warmth in our lives, not just equations and beakers and silicone friends.
When we ask Science to take a bow, we may be thinking of imaginative and hardworking laboratory workers. It can be helpful when thinking of what science is and who scientists are to think of five typical chapters in a doctoral dissertation:
Introduction - what is this document about
Review of research - what have others already done with this topic
Method - what was done by the author
Results - what happened
Conclusions and implications - what does this mean? What are implications for the future?
You can probably see that judgment, supposition and hope, as well as luck, all have a place in choosing a topic, deciding what to call it and say about it, finding related research that has already been carried out.
In our current society, science, technology, engineering and mathematics all matter but so do finance, politics, the legal system and marketing. If you are interested in science and related fields going astray, you may want to look at "mistakes in science" in Google:
