A Love Letter to Science

By Riley Black

Dinosaurs are often gateways to science. 

When I was a little girl, I visited a cavernous museum hall full of bones. Lined up as if on parade were all my prehistoric favorites, the menacing Allosaurus, the spike-tailed Stegosaurus, and the massive "Brontosaurus" gleaming in the light. I was fascinated. I wanted to know what the dinosaurs sounded like, how they smelled, what they looked like - all these things that I didn't know but I desperately wanted to. And in that moment of wonder, I started a long relationship with science.

Science can have more than one definition. To some, science is a network of institutions, experts, techniques, and protocols - what we might think of as the machinery of science. This definition of science can be complicated. It's easy to confuse the results and infrastructure of science with science as a curiosity-driven process, and this complication is what sometimes leads to people to use the results of science to harm others. This is why we have historians of science, to remind us that science is done by people within the context of their time and place and identity. 

But when I think of science, I think of what science means as an idea. That there is a natural reality that we can observe and interact with, and by asking questions - over and over - we can start to piece together a deeper understanding of our world and our universe. That's at the core of science, that it's a process focused on what we can test and verify, building upon itself as we learn more.

Consider the fate of one of those dinosaurs that so impressed my younger self, "Brontosaurus." The dinosaur was named in the 19th century, recognized as being the same as Apatosaurus at the beginning of the 20th, and had a dual life being popularized to the public even as paleontologists abandoned the name. The discovery of an Apatosaurus skull in the 1970s helped to bring the dinosaur back into focus again, although some recent work has hinted that "Brontosaurus" might be a valid dinosaur after all. The whole saga highlights how science works - that experts found a skeleton, reanalyzed it, and have gone back over and over again to double and triple check their expectations about this animal, learning a little more each time. Making mistakes, in a sense, is built into science and are expected because part of the process is comparing what we thought we knew to what we have only just realized. I think that's beautiful.

Naturally, science needs a spark. We didn't have to invent science. But there is so much to wonder about, so much that piques our curiosity about the world. That curiosity is the spark that drives science, that gives our inquiries the starting energy they require. In my favored discpline of paleontology, that can be as simple as stumbling across a fossil bone in the field or opening a museum drawer to say "Hm, that's funny..." We start with what we think we know and what catches our attention. Science helps us navigate through the rest, constantly self-correcting to get us closer and closer to what we hope to understand.

Science doesn't require a lab coat, a microscope, or even a supercollider to participate in. It's an idea that's accessible to anyone, a process by which we observe, test, and learn something new. In fact, much of what's formally thought of as science in terms of institutions and publications relies on the inspiration and insight of community scientists. Science is a process that can change how we think and how we react to the world around us. It's so simple an idea, but so incredibly powerful.

Click here to share your own #LoveLettersToScience with us.

We'll share them in February with the world on our website and social media on the weekend of Darwin Day and Valentine's Day.

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, and is a science writer for the Natural History Museum of Utah, a part of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Our mission is to illuminate the natural world and the place of humans within it. In addition to housing outstanding exhibits for the public, NHMU is a research museum. Learn more.