This TED Talk features astronomer Phil Clayt, recorded live at TEDx Boulder, 2018.

Now, people have a lot of misconceptions about science, about how it works and what it is.

A big one is that science is just a big old pile of facts. But that's not true. That's not even the goal of science.

Science is a process. It's a way of thinking. Gathering facts is just a piece of it, but it's not the goal. The ultimate goal of science

is to understand objective reality the best way we know how, and that's based on evidence.

Now, the problem here is that people are flawed.

We can be fooled.

We're really good at fooling ourselves.

And so baked into this process is a way of minimizing our own bias.

So sort of boil down more than is probably useful.

Here's how this works.

If you want to do some science,

what you want to do is you want to observe something. Say, the sky is blue. Hey, I wonder why.

You question it. The next thing you do is you come up with an idea that may explain it, a hypothesis.

Well, you know what? Oceans are blue. Maybe the sky is reflecting the colors from the ocean.

Great, but now you have to test it, so you predict what that might mean. Your prediction would be,

well, if the sky is reflecting the ocean color, it'll be bluer on the coasts than it will be in the middle of the country. Okay, that's fair enough, but you've got to

test that prediction. So you get on a plane, you leave Denver on a nice gray day, you fly to L.A.,

you look up, and the sky is gloriously blue. Hooray, your thesis is proven. But is it, really? No,

you've made one observation. You need to think about your hypothesis,

think about how to test it, and do more than just one. Maybe you could go to a different part of the

country or a different part of the year and see what the weather is like then. Another good idea is to

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