It’s a race against the clock.
Bill wants to get to the finish line, but there’s a wall in the way – a big one. Going around isn’t an option, so he generates as much momentum as possible, presses down with force and explodes skyward.
Nope.
Again? No.
One more time? Nah.
Instead he jumps down some plumbing pipes, pops out the other side, runs to the next screen and saves the princess.
Billy is a 6 year old scientist.
He formulated a hypothesis: ‘To get past the wall I need to jump over it’. Billy conducted the experiment as best he could, but it didn’t yield the result he hoped (a different story if he chowed some shrooms earlier). He then formulated a new hypothesis, tested it and got the result he wanted.
Science is a word used to describe lots of different things. Done well it’s typically falsifiable (Popper), predictive (reproducibility) and has a hard to vary explanation (Deutsch).
Science is usually assumed rigorous. This prevents us from being scientific and asking questions about it. Instead, with a simple enough definition the scientific method is a natural mode of thought. It therefore predates science, humanity even.
This mode is a keeper, problem is it’s just one of many. So smart people double down on it.
Thought Unfinished 