Jacob Berkowitz writes that, when most of us graduate from school, we have a pretty fuzzy idea of what science is:

Most of us leave high school, and any study of science, with a fundamentally skewed vision of science’s nature. We tend to think of science as a noun, as facts in textbooks, but not also as a verb, as the doing of research. This is a crucial difference.

But it's wise to consider the etymology of the word:

The word “science” comes from a Latin root for “to know.” Yet on the way to knowing, science is ultimately about the right, responsibility and challenge of living with doubt. As Albert Einstein quipped, “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research.”

The reason we call the period in Europe around 1600 the Scientific Revolution is exactly because it was an intellectual rebellion against the primacy of received knowledge from the church or the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers such as Aristotle. The first scientists, such as Galileo, were fundamentally heretics (from the Greek, “to choose”) because they asserted that the nature of reality could be perceived by individuals in the present through careful experimentation and observation.

In recent years, there's been an effort to turn knowledge into dogma -- and effort which is fundamentally unscientific. People fear uncertainty. And they fear the notion that our knowledge is incomplete. So when scientists change their advice on wearing masks they are called untrustworthy. All they are doing is what scientists have always done -- working collectively:

What gives science its power as a way of knowing is that it’s collective knowing – it’s the facts that we can collectively agree on through repeated experimentation and observation. It’s why Britain’s Royal Society (the world’s oldest science club) has the motto Nullius in verba, Latin for “take nobody’s word for it.” This isn’t about being bull-headed and arrogant, it’s because scientists know that while the truth is out there, it is more often than not incredibly difficult to figure out.

This is not a  time for simple answers. But it is a time to pay attention to collectively gathered evidence -- and to act accordingly.

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