{"id":9735,"date":"2014-12-09T09:06:34","date_gmt":"2014-12-09T14:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9735"},"modified":"2014-12-09T09:06:34","modified_gmt":"2014-12-09T14:06:34","slug":"eight-things-you-need-to-know-about-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/12\/09\/eight-things-you-need-to-know-about-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Eight Things You Need to Know About Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

Copies of Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist<\/a> have been turning up in the wild for a while now, but the officially official release date is today (available from Amazon<\/a>, Barnes and Noble<\/a>, IndieBound<\/a>, Powell’s<\/a>, and anywhere else books are sold). To mark that, here’s some stuff I wrote about the core message of the book, presented in Internet-friendly listicle form:<\/p>\n

Eight Things You Need to Know About Science<\/strong><\/p>\n

1) Everybody Is a Scientist:<\/strong> Most people picture scientists as remote eggheads, who think in ways that ordinary people can\u2019t comprehend, but the reality is very different. Scientists are not that smart, and ordinary people use scientific thinking all the time\u2014in fact, every time you play cards, or sports, or even a video game like Angry Birds, you\u2019re thinking like a scientist.<\/p>\n

2) Science Is a Process:<\/strong> The basis of all of science is a simple four-step process: you Look<\/em> at the world around you, you Think<\/em> about why it might work that way, you Test<\/em> your theory with experiments and observations, and you Tell<\/em> everyone you know the results of the test. This is exactly the process you use in videogames: you look at the arrangement of pigs and blocks, you think about which block you should hit with which bird, you test your theory by launching birds, and if it works, you brag to your friends about how you cleared the level. It\u2019s a process that\u2019s part of everything we do.<\/p>\n

3) Stamp Collecting and Biology:<\/strong> The scientific process starts with collecting observations about the world, in exactly the same way that people collect stamps, or coins, or rocks. And this can be crucial to scientific discovery. Charles Darwin wasn\u2019t the first person to come up with the idea of evolution\u2014his own grandfather was promoting evolutionary ideas sixty years before On the Origin of Species\u2014but Charles became an icon of science because his theory was backed by mountains of evidence, collected over years of careful observation, a piece at a time, like so many stamps.<\/p>\n