Science is hard. Not because the subject matter is all that hard to deal with -- in most cases, it's not. Indeed, it's quite simple.
The hard part of science is that it involves ways of thinking that are quite backward from the way most people are used to thinking.
A theory, for example, gains its power far more from what it rules out than from what it explains.
And the first thing that happens with any new theory is scientists flock to it and try to prove it false. A theory is not given any respect until it's resisted these efforts for quite a while, and even a very old and well-established theory is subject to occasional attacks by people looking for that one weak spot.
In a way, thinking about science is a lot like trying to do some intricate task while watching yourself in a mirror. It's easy to get your signals mixed up and get everything backwards. It's just not natural for human beings to think the way scientists do. (Which may be why it took us most of recorded history to come up with it.)
John Derbyshire offers a thought about science which I like:
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.
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