I’m acquainted with the scientific method myself, but when I try to explain it to science deniers I always fall short of capturing what makes it such a universal and thorough method. Any help?
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I just googled my horoscope, and got this:
> There’s an explosive quality about the day. You may walk along, minding your own business, when someone accidentally bumps into you. Your first reaction may be to push that person back. Carelessness on the part of others may cause you to get worked up into fits of rage. Do your best to keep these tendencies under control, especially when driving.
What’s “explosive” about the day? Does diarrhoea count? Fireworks? I “may” walk along minding my own business when somebody bumps into me. Do the random people in the Diablo 4 Beta count? Running into people while I’m minding my own business is definitely a new experience for me in a Diablo game. How annoyed do I have to be at Blizzard’s failure to scale their servers to deal with the spike in activity for it to count as “a fit of rage”?
Is this horoscope right or wrong? Is this psychic real or not? All these statements are so vague and open to interpretation that you can’t really tell which is which.
Now, take a simple statement: “all cats are black”. No they’re not, I can show you photos of my sister’s ginger cat as proof. That statement is false, but it’s very clearly, obviously, unambiguously false. That, right there, is the essence of science. “All cats are black” is, at some level, a good scientific statement where my horoscope isn’t, _because it’s easy to tell that it’s wrong_. Science is a combination of trying to make as precise predictions about the world as you can, then trying to measure those predictions against reality.
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