The Crucial Distinction Between Scientists and Science

I like to make the distinction between scientists and science.  Scientists are folks like me and you and everybody else.  We’re humans and we have all the properties of most humans.  There is egotistic.  There is modest.  There is bravado.  There are all these things.  There is overstatement.  There is understatement. 

All that stuff goes on in the reporting of science. But the actual business of science is this slowly moving, wonderful public event in which all people have access to the information.  All people can evaluate it and science comes in and clears up and defines problems and explains them.  That is science.  Scientists we sometimes get annoyed with, but not science. 

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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