Science is the current best guess

From the March 11 issue of The Christian Century (page 9):

There are two sayings that astronomer Aileen O’Donoghue repeats to her students: “Science is the current best guess” and “You can’t do science in your basement.”

By the first remark, she means that we can never be certain about scientific theories (which is not to say that theories are not to be taken seriously or that the theory of evolution, say, or Newton’s law of gravity can be discarded).

Her second point is that though you can do experiments in a basement, findings must be brought into the light of day and subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific community. The testing of some findings can take a long time—it took 300 years for an error to be discovered in Newton’s Principia

(The Sky Is Not a Ceiling: An Astronomer’s Faith, Orbis).