What is science?
As I said, I'm not a scientist, so I'm going to pull in a few ideas from Richard Feynman, who was a scientist, and whom a lot of people say was a pretty good one.
The test of all knowledge is experiment
I like that. I don't think it's entirely true, but if you're going to do science or be scientific, then you probably need to think that way.
Science is more than just doing a lot of experiments, it's also:
- making explicit guesses about reality
- designing experiments to falsify or verify those guesses
- actually performing experiments
- interpreting the results of experiments
- changing your beliefs based on the result of experiments
- sharing the process, details, results, and interpretations of experiments
- questioning the validity of experiments
- learning about past experiments and understanding what they mean
- making stories out of experiments to help yourself and others understand new things
- insisting on having evidence
And probably many more things. All of this is a lot of work.