I saw a comic a while back, which I can't now locate, that was "science through the eyes of laymen" vs "science through the eyes of scientists". The "laymen" s

I saw a comic a while back, which I can't now locate, that was "science through the eyes of laymen" vs "science through the eyes of scientists". The "laymen" side was filled with experiments that worked perfectly; the "scientists" side was filled with things like "this data doesn't make any sense" and "I've run this experiment 5 times, and gotten 5 completely different results". The punchline is the laymen flipping out about something fairly well established (probably vaccines and autism), and the scientists eventually making something that works. That's where the difficulty lies -- science is a very messy, very human process that's not nearly so clean or accurate as most people expect. But it also occasionally generates useful results, which are then studied in more detail and lead to things like "planes fly" or "we can detect this type of cancer earlier, and operate before it metastasizes". The results of one study in science are of little value, but the results of the long process of science are often tremendously valuable.