Science with a capital S

The term science means many things to many people. One of the worst, in my opinion, is the idea of men in white lab coats in a fancy, expensive lab. The implication I find so frustrating is that science is restricted to certain people at certain times. If anything, most of the science has been squeezed out of the process by the time it gets to a laboratory. Science is not a mechanical process, and often it's the most prestigious people who hijack the process the most.

Growing up, I've been continually shocked how easy it is to be the first to discover something completely new. Kids assume that all the good discoveries have been taken, or put Einstein on a pedestal, but so many monumental ideas have come from unchecked curiosity rather than experience and training. Sure, all the movie stars tell kids that they can be anything they want if they follow their dreams, but it always has a sort of detached "stay in school, don't do drugs, and someday..." feel to it. I like to think that science isn't too good for the rest of us, and I hope that Wikipedia and similar efforts will start to make that a viable perspective.

A similar idea is that science is one of many alternatives, e.g. "Science can't tell us everything". I don't think it's stretching things much to say that just trusting our senses is the foundation of science, and the alternative is insanity. If you can't believe your senses, then miracles don't mean anything, either.

I believe the idea that emotions are an alternative to science is based on two fallacies: that emotions can be separated from "rational" thought, and that such disembodied emotions deserve to be the basis of truth. Marvin Minsky's book "The Emotion Machine" makes a wonderful case that what we think of as emotions and intuition are an inherent part of all thought, and that real genius comes from a certain balance of emotions. That said, if someone insists on pitting emotion or anything else against science in the arena of truth, then they're an agent of confusion and I can't afford to take them seriously.

I'd like to indict one other misconception, the idea that Science is a united, infallible force. I've seen way too many angsty teenagers (and adults) proclaim that Science is their god and that Science proves them right. Science is an incredibly error-prone process, and the people who think otherwise are doing it wrong. There's no authoritative collection of scientific truth, and many experiments are flawed or even faked, not to mention that the results have to be interpreted. True airtight proof is only a mental model, and if you're going to claim that you have all the answers then please find your own term. It isn't science.