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may be able to track down the problem even without really understanding how a DVD player works.
    "Or maybe you're trying to troubleshoot your pet," Sternberg said. "Why does the fish look funny? Why is my dog upset? I'll feed the hamster less or I'll feed it more, or maybe it doesn't like the noise, so I'll move it away from the stereo system. Should I take Job A or Job B? Well, let me see how long the drive would be from the office to my daughter's school during rush hour; that could be the killer factor in making a decision. These are all examples of forming hypotheses, doing experiments, coming up with controls. Some people learn these things at an early age. I had to get a Ph.D. to figure them out."
    A number of scientists proposed that people may have been more comfortable with the nuts and bolts of science back when they were comfortable with nuts and bolts. "It was easier to introduce students and the lay public to science when people fixed their own cars or had their hands in machinery of various kinds," said David Botstein of Princeton. "In the immediate period after World War II, everybody who'd been through basic training knew how a differential gear worked because they had taken one apart."
    Farmers, too, were natural scientists. They understood the nuances of seasons, climate, plant growth, the do-si-do between parasite and host. The scientific curiosity that entitled our nation's Founding Fathers to membership in Club Renaissance, Anyone? had agrarian roots.
Thomas Jefferson experimented with squashes and broccoli imported from Italy, figs from France, peppers from Mexico, beans collected by Lewis and Clark, as he systematically sought to select the "best" species of fruits and vegetables the world had to offer and "to reject all others from the garden." George Washington designed new methods of fertilizing and rotating crops and invented the sixteen-sided treading barn, in which horses would gallop over freshly harvested wheat and efficiently shake the grain from the stalks.
    "The average adult American today knows less about biology than the average ten-year-old living in the Amazon, or than the average American of two hundred years ago," said Andrew Knoll, a professor of natural history at Harvard's Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. "Through the fruits of science, ironically enough, we've managed to insulate people from the need to know about science and nature." Yet still, people troubleshoot their pets, their kids, and, in moments of utter recklessness, their computers, and they apply scientific reasoning in many settings without realizing it, for the simple reason that the method works so well.
    Much of the reason for its success is founded on another fundamental of the scientific bent. Scientists accept, quite staunchly, that there is a reality capable of being understood, and understood in ways that can be shared with and agreed upon by others. We can call this "objective" reality if we like, as opposed to subjective reality, or opinion, or "whimsical set of predilections." The contrast is deceptive, however, for it implies that the two are discrete entities with remarkably little in common. Objective reality is out there, other, impersonal, and "not me," while subjective reality is private, intimate, inimitable, and life as it is truly lived. Objective reality is cold and abstract; subjective reality is warm and Rockwell. Science is effective because it bypasses such binaries in favor of what might be called empirical universalism, the rigorously outfitted and enormously fruitful premise that the objective reality of the universe comprises the subjective reality of every one of us. We are of the universe, and by studying the universe we ultimately turn the mirror on ourselves. "Science is not describing a universe out there, and we're separate entities," said Brian Greene. "We're part of that universe, we're made of the same stuff as that universe, of ingredients that behave according to the same