It's important to talk about what science is, and what it is not. Science has been given a cold, arrogant persona as an institution, which really isn't fair. There are cold, arrogant scientists, but I'd wager that there are people of that sort in any profession. It can be said that science is made up of the thoughts and actions of every scientist, but if that's so it seems even more silly to think of science as inhuman and cold; it can almost be described in a mathematical proof: human does not equal inhuman.

Firstly, science is a lot more modest than people tend to think. Science doesn't say "I KNOW ALL AND SEE ALL." That's preposterous - no one does. But, even if science doesn't have omniscience, at least it has ideas. Science doesn't even claim that its ideas are right - it tells us whether or not they appear to work.

And really, it's pretty important to know that things will work, regardless of how "right" they are. After all, isn't effectiveness more easily agreed upon than righteousness? This ethereal-to-concrete property of science is what has brought us things like the wheel, pasteurized milk, and mass spectrometry. Things amongst which, by the way, are what built the "scientific institution" and gave it its influence. Science wouldn't have the power it does in our lives if it didn't make a difference. It is a collection of observations, and inferences made from those observations. It gets to a point where one has to choose their words carefully if they're going to try and talk about what science does. Otherwise, people end up with the misguided notion that scientific fact equals truth.

A normal, run-of-the-mill fact does actually equal objective truth. This "fact," however, does not have an adjective in front of it. A scientific fact is an established, or rather trusted, idea within the body of scientific knowledge. And scientific knowldege is different than the sort of knowledge that God or Alan Greenspan has. Scientific knowledge is just a long, long list of things that have been seen, written down, and seen again.

So, what science describes is not the Universe, but the Apparent Universe, upon which it can be agreed that there is a distinction between the two. On to why that's good enough for me.

This humility on the part of science I find to be refreshingly honest. The Bible pretends like there's no such thing as questions, or at least that the answers to any of them are obvious. Even more vexing is the answers the Bible tends to give to any question starting with "Why?" All too many answers end up with a source that says "It dishonors God," or "It dishonors what God gave you," which to me sounds like "Because that's how it is."

Another factor in my leanings is how I prioritize incoming data. That is to say, I don't prioritize it. Whether it be emotional, tactile, gustatory, etc., I take it all in with an equal amount of seriousness. I don't trust the fact that I'm crying to mean something any more than I do that I just heard a knock at the door does. This goes back to the notion that science doesn't tell me the truth. Science doesn't tell me any more about truth than emotions do. Counselors have often told me that emotions don't come as "true" or "untrue." It's the way they impact us that's important, and such is the case with science. The only difference is that science requires an event to be replicable, but science deals with the entire human race, not just what's going on in my head. Not everyone can be at the place where an event takes place, but I can always be where my thoughts are, and thus have little need for a Sunday matinee of the laughing fit I just had.

Finally, at the risk of sacrificing the weight of this piece, I choose the most obvious, though probably least convincing of all reasons I could use to express my true love for science: it's what moves me. Never have I not wanted to be a scientist. The best thing I know (now watch as I get lazy, using words like "know" and "true") is that the shape of the enzyme ATP synthetase is that of a turbine, and as a proton shoots through it because of an electrical imbalance, it turns the "blades" of the "turbine", producing mechanical energy which is used to add a phosphate group to ADP, and make the wondrous energy molecule, ATP. That tiny tidbit is something that makes me smile. What makes science even more compelling to me is the intuitive trust I feel for it goes along with something I can see before my eyes. Over and over again. When I saw auroras erupting in the sky last winter, it seemed too good to be true that the fantastic things in my textbooks were real and they had an explanation.

Chemistry is what fascinates me the most. Biochemistry, specifically. After all, isn't life the most exciting kind of chemistry? It's fast-paced, complicated, and important. The best part is that, for all of its seeming intangibility, its end result is a reality I deal with every day. Even most of the minute atomic processes are, or will be visible with the right tools and frame of mind.

I reach this point, and words tend to fail me, as is often the case when dealing with real love.