 So what is science, anyway? -- The scientific method, and the "demarcation problem"
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 Intro
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The term "science" tends to be thrown around very liberally these days
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Odd thing -- while society as a whole seems to be a bit ambivalent about science, apparently the term has at least some sort of marketing value
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Future episodes will delve deeper into what is & isn't good science, but for this episode, I'll try to focus on a simpler target -- what is this thing called "science," and how can you reliably tell the difference between science & non-science?
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Pretty easy to get "dry" with this stuff -- I'll try to keep this episode fast-moving
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Science -- a high-level definition
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If it's any consolation, scientists and philosophers have been arguing for decades about how to define & perform science
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 Part of the problem for ordinary folks -- how they learned about science. When it comes to teaching science, it's easy to fall back into trap of teaching science as just a body of knowledge.
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Science isn't primarily a collection of equations and data -- it's a process, and a mindset.
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As the Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynmann once observed, science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling outselves.
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Scientific method
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In a sense, talking about THE scientific method is a misnomer. Different fields of science have to take somewhat different approaches. Still, you can see the scientific method as an ideal with 4 steps -- observation, hypothesis formulation, prediction & test, iteration.
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Example: how does boiling point of water change with amount of salt in it?
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Observe -- tinker around with varying salt concentrations in water, measure temperature of water when it boils
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Hypothesis -- after analyzing a few data points, draw up graph to predict how this changes over wider range of salinity
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Prediction & test -- use your graph to predict behavior at some other salinity range; test to see how close you got
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Iteration -- keep looping through this until your graph covers the range of conditions you can test over
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Mindset issues -- ideals to pursue
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Deep commitment to objective truth
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Rational approach to uncovering the truth
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Searching for cause & effect
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Don't accept things at face value; test everything, including (maybe especially) your own preconceptions
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Role of scientific community -- poke at things, act as "sanity check" on hypotheses & conclusions
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The demarcation problem
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Science vs. non-science
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Common failings of non-science
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Wrapup
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Societal vs. scientific use of term "theory"
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Since we're always learning, the current state of knowledge is always changing
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Some thoughts on what makes a hypothesis or theory scientific
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Additional challenge to general public -- science & pseudoscience gets filtered through the mass media, often distorted. News presented as "science" could fall into any one of a number of categories
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Sources and other links
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Keywords -- science scientific method demarcation problem
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License The use of these shownotes is governed by a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5) license
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