Class is in session.

Now, when you're faced with a new discovery, something brand new pops up in your experiment

or your observations or your telescope or your laboratory, whatever,

you have two choices. When something unexpected happens, you can either say,

Eureka, that's exciting. Or you can say, shut up. Observational science is built on finding

patterns and structures. This is like a good chunk of what science is built on finding patterns and structures.

This is like a good chunk of what science is, is just making observation after observation and looking for the patterns, looking for the correlations, looking for what connects

one thing to another thing, to look for structures in everything from biological rhythms to celestial

rhythms. So a lot of rhythms. But what happens when something shows up to buck the trend?

Something that doesn't fit on the known patterns or structures.

This is, it's so fundamental in so much of what I've talked about, not just in this series.

And yes, this is a part of a series called Astro 101, where I'm talking about some of the

basics in astronomy.

So new listeners have somewhere to go to get up to speed, and then old listeners can just relive

the glory days of their college freshman astronomy class.

So much of what I talk about in this series, and also this entire show, is patterns and structures

that we find in nature.

And we learn a lot.

It's through those patterns and structures that we are able to infer,

that we are able to deduce, that we are able to ground our mathematical theories in a realistic

basis, and then go out and make predictions and do all that fun, sciencey stuff. But what happens

when something shows up that doesn't work?

...