Brain Fertilizer

*puts on his former-Professional-Scientist hat on*

I recalls some days, back in computer programming, before I was alive, about a certain Oracle that resided in the temple of the servers.

For hours you toiled, creating a complex computer code to convert Kilograms to Pounds, and translated that code to the always reliable media of "Punch Cards"

Carefully, you put your punch cards in precice order and with the most piety you could muster, you carried your offering to the Oracle inside the Temple of Mainframe and in penetance to the Server Priests to process your code to their server, and execute your program (that is, if it compiled without errors!)

Yes, the Mainframe Oracle Priests could do no wrong.

(This is the image I have when I see how the public perceives Scientists of any discipline)

Scientists are just a bunch of data collecters (At least the experimentalists are.) Or they are a bunch of mathematical philosophers. (Where mathematics are derived, crunched, and integrated into complex equations of theory and ideas.)

The data collectors collect enough data to make a theory. The philosophers compute enough to mathematically equate what they would suppose occurs in nature. In both cases, a realm of probability is created. (When A occurs, B will occur somewhere around here.)
Approximations are made to centre it to something they can teach to their colleagues.

That is then put into textbooks and sold to the publisher that bids the highest.

(Okay, so its more complex than that)

But its all a case of people, men, women, trying to make sense of the Creation around them.

We've been doing this for thousands of years.

We've had varying degrees of success.

But if you ask an honest scientists about what is fact and what is theory, facts are rare.

But the way we look at Science!, we think that Facts are abound.

Nicely put, Jeremy.