“Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd) in a scene from the 1985 movie “Back to the Future”

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

For years, the concept of “science” as been politicized, as if it were possessed ONLY by one political party, as if the other political party and its members were still in the literal stone age.

Worse, this party says “I believe in science” as if science were a theology or philosophy. A Christian would say “I believe in Jesus” because the Bible says belief alone in Jesus is significant and leads to eternal life.

But how can you “believe” in science? What is science?

According to the Understanding Science page at the UC Museum of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley (just to assure my critics that I’m not citing from some far-right, dodgy, unintellectual source):

Science is both a body of knowledge and a process. In school, science may sometimes seem like a collection of isolated and static facts listed in a textbook, but that’s only a small part of the story. Just as importantly, science is also a process of discovery that allows us to link isolated facts into coherent and comprehensive understandings of the natural world.

I tend to reframe that definition to say that science is a standardized, methodical examination of anything in the observable universe. It’s a lot of asking questions. It’s also continuing to test information believed to be substantiated even decades ago. Nothing is static in science. We’re learning new things and upgrading our understanding of our world daily.

The Berkeley source also says:

Continue reading →