Free Republic

In perhaps his most famous quip of all time, celebrated physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, when speaking about new discoveries, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” When you do science yourself, engaging in the process of research and inquiry, there are many ways you can become your own worst enemy. If you’re the one proposing a new idea, you must avoid falling into the trap of becoming enamored with it; if you do, you run the risk of choosing to emphasize only the results that support it, while discounting...

There are a lot of different ways to define science, but perhaps one that everyone can agree on is that it’s a process by which: 1.knowledge about the natural world or a particular phenomenon is gathered, 2.a testable hypothesis is put forth concerning a natural, physical explanation for that phenomenon, 3.that hypothesis is then tested and either validated or falsified, 4.and an overarching framework — or scientific theory — is constructed to explain the hypothesis and that makes predictions about other phenomena, 5.which is then tested further, and either validated, in which case new phenomena to test are sought (back...