A long time ago I studied biochem in university. It took me until the third time memorizing the Krebs cycle (energy metabolism) to start asking "how the heck di

A long time ago I studied biochem in university. It took me until the third time memorizing the Krebs cycle (energy metabolism) to start asking "how the heck did Krebs et al figure this out?" And I had already read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I memorized Krebs for the SECOND time. I, personally, got stuck in received wisdom for too long. Science is a discipline for confronting mystery. It's about what we don't know. It's also big business, driven by money, prestige, and power (like most human endeavors). In that sense, it's a lot like religion. Religion, as practiced in the US, has the four pillars of the Wesleyan quadrilateral: * Scripture * Tradition * Reason * Experience * The Pennsylvania science-teaching guidelines notwithstanding, school science curricula are mostly teaching "scripture." No, I don't mean wakky interpretations of ancient texts. I mean memorizing received wisdom and getting tested on accurate memories. The Krebs cycle is an advanced hunk of that kind of scripture. Tradition comes into play when, for example, grad students fear to challenge the stuff discovered by the Nobel laureates who run their labs. It's valid to critique the way tradition controls inquiry. Reason and experience: Those are cognitive tools to use when doing the Karl Popper thing: dreaming up things that can be proven wrong and then trying to prove them wrong. But we need at least some scripture and tradition to apply reason and experience. Learning science is hard even when it's just "scripture" and "tradition". Embracing the mysteries -- the unknown -- is even harder. Science means accepting that "everything we know might be wrong." We should still try.