What is one scientific idea you wish everyone would understand, and why?
The essence of the “scientific method” is self-skepticism.I see the difference between a scientist and a non-scientist in a simple way:a non-scientist is easily fooled, and is particularly vulnerable to self-deception.a scientist is easily fooled, and is particularly vulnerable to self-deception, and knows that.The essence of science is its objectivity. When similar objectivity is tried in other fields, they sometimes append the term science to it, as in “political science”. Objectivity is extremely difficult to obtain.My research group once had a visiting scientist who made a presentation to my graduate students. After he left, I asked the students to name the one statement that he had made that internally infuriated me; the statement which, if made by one of them, would have inspired me to “kick the student down a flight of steps” (not literally, but figuratively). To my disappointment, none had noticed the offending statement; none of them could identify it.The offending statement was this: “What I am trying to prove is the following ….”To me, that indicated a bias in favor of one particular answer. With that bias, there would be great difficulty in evaluating the data in a truly objective way. To overcome such bias, the first step is to recognize its existence.What would have made me happy would have been the following substitution for his offending statement: “There is speculation that “X” is valid. I would like to test that hypothesis, and see if it is true or false.”Nevertheless, the visit by the scientist gave me an excellent chance to teach the most important lesson in science: that objectivity is the essence of science, and it is confounded by our prejudices; we must be acutely aware of them and fight against them at every step.