The sports reported as science bit has made its way around, and I while I was thinking of things to perhaps improve the analogies, it occurred to me that the whole part about “people don’t understand that jargon, can you dumb it down?” can be recast as “science is like a sport you’ve never seen before.”

If you’ve never seen a particular activity, and your only option was to watch (i.e. there’s nobody to explain it to you), how would you figure out the rules? You’d observe and look for patterns. You’d take note of repeated actions to see that they are consistent: player uses foot or head to hit the ball. You also may notice that some things don’t happen: hand touching the ball stops play. But then there are exceptions: doesn’t apply to the guy with the big gloves. He seems to be the only one who can handle the ball, and he wears a different colored jersey . Or, with baseball: if the ball touches the ground, the players seem to react differently than when it is hit in the air.

With repeated observation, you can guess at some of the rules. You can build a model and start to predict what would happen under certain conditions to see if your guess at the rules is correct. If it doesn’t, you have to know if there was something different about the circumstances to know if this is an exception or you were just plain wrong. Some of the more obscure rules take a lot of watching to uncover, and will look like anomalies at first. How many baseball games would you have to watch to see the infield fly rule invoked, and how many time would you have to see it before you could figure out the specific conditions under which it applies?

Observational science is just like this. At least part of astronomy, geology and paleontology, and perhaps others, rely solely on the ability to make repeated observations and figure out laws from the patterns of what does and doesn’t happen.

At the next level, you can also infer behavior that is due to strategy, which is based on the rules but not strictly part of it. There’s no rule in baseball that says the first baseman must hold a runner on, but the ability to take a lead and steal a base dictates this action. Much like the elliptical orbits plants being a derived behavior, based on the more fundamental rule of gravity being an inverse-square law. The orbits were noticed first, though, and the underlying rule was deduced later.