Scientific training?

An editorial by Richard Smith, then senior editor of the British Medical Journal, asked whether doctors are scientists (and answered "No"). After a brief fizz of debate the consensus between those contributing feedback remarks was: on occasion, but only as part of the job. An interesting analogy was made with pilots, who may know a lot about the plane but not as much as the mechanic. Someone else quoted Levi Strauss as saying that doctors don't ask questions but supply answers (scientists being the question-askers). Of course "being a scientist" can be something you do while not being something you are; there's a difference between day job and life style. If you do science full time, even during those aimless minutes and perhaps hours perched on the toilet, if you live it, you are the thing I have called here a Compleat Scientist. And doing science, whichever room you are in, doesn't need jargon. You can even do it by accident.

All it takes is a prediliction towards testing and puzzling stuff out coupled with a willingness to learn from mistakes. The Compleat Scientist is just a person, any person, happy to make assumptions and certain to question them immediately and thoroughly. There has to be an in-built tendency to make life a systematic learning experience. Character traits like playfulness and imagination combined with a certain flavour of thoughtfulness and intellectual rigour aren't actually that rare. Look at the people you know; surely somebody fits that description. You don't have to wear a labcoat to be comfortable with the unknown and be keen to know.

Do you observe things, make guesses about things, then try and find out for yourself? That's all science is (well, it's a successful algorithm for doing that). It's nice (and at times necessarily precise and scholarly and useful) to couch such things in technical terms like falsifiable hypothesis formulation, inductive and deductive reasoning, controlling for variables, devising experiments and interpreting data, and so on; then we can clearly discuss the scientific method and tease out the deeper implications of it all. You don't have to do that though, even in the aimless moments of a big session in the small room. The philosophy is optional. Yet that method isn't as far from the mundane as many seem to think. You do it if you make up your own recipes and manage not to poison people, or at least not to poison them repeatedly; if you give small children a slice of lemon to see their faces (use your own kids please); if you try to diagnose and treat an ailing animal yourself; if you try to find the best way to get through a crowd or the best queue to stand in; if you figure out how to work some arcane piece of machinery (home electronics, printing press, scythe) without reading the manual or doing an apprenticeship; if you try a shortcut to your destination one day "just to see"; if you floss one side and not the other to see if it makes a difference; if you tinker; if you play; if you try things, test things, distrust things, generalize from things; if you change your mind when you learn something new. It's a matter of wondering, working out what question will give an answer, asking, then wondering if that is all. That's a scientific stance, that's science as more than a day job.

Taking the scientific stance is something most humans do at some point (however briefly); if it is your default stance then you are a Compleat Scientist, and you probably have understanding friends who wear tolerant smiles. You don't need a synchrotron or a centrifuge to do it. You don't need a PhD and a familiarity with the Standard Model or the Central Dogma or the Drake Equation or the Continuum Hypothesis to do it. The scientific method as a permanent mental state is not tied to specific knowledge and is no more of a crutch than "Do six impossible things before breakfast". It isn't hard at all.