The Scientific Staircase

The education of our earliest years is introduced to us in the most basic of understanding, so much that we are actually lied to in the beginning. As children we are told babies are delivered by storks, and if you make that face too long it will stay like that. In kindergarten we are taught the colors blue, green, yellow and red. In counting there are only whole numbers, and if the teacher asks you the next number after 4 the only acceptable answer is 5, even though there are infinite numbers between.
Such is the eternal life of a scientist. As a student you are often told that you were lied to in your previous classes, in some cases by the same teacher that committed the white lie. In the educational path of a geologist, you will hear “I know we told you in intro that quartzite is metamorphic, but we lied to you. It isn’t always metamorphic”. The sciences are a never-ending staircase of sorts, a final landing never in sight. Each set of stairs marks an achievement, only to see the next set of stairs that you must climb.
After kindergarten, colors become more complicated. By high school you have discovered that blue is not necessarily a color in itself, but a whole family of colors. There is aqua, teal, cyan, sky blue, and turquoise. In college colors bloom into something even more complicated, and they differe depending on your major. As an art or design student you learn more colors by their name, such as cerulean, glaucous, Azure. If you are a scientist, the colors start taking on numbers such as a B-V of -0.04 for a star. In the case of my favorite color of crayon, what Crayola labels as “Cerulean”, it takes on titles such as RGB 29,172,214 or an HSV of 209*, 94%, 49%.
I think this is why so much of the public has trouble understanding a scientist’s reply when asked a straight-forward question. The answer is, and always will be, one that is constantly fluctuating with time and research. Is it wrong to call a cerulean sweater as a blue sweater? No, but there is certainly more to that, and in the future there may be an even stricter categorization for these colors. As math dictates, there are infinite possibilities for any answer. Not only are there infinite numbers, but there are infinite numbers between each of the counting numbers we use so often.
The scientific staircase is one that is never ending. In becoming a scientist we learn to accept that we will never be 100% accurate, because in the future more research could discover something we were unable to view previously. The purpose of research is not to find the end point, but rather find a grand marker in the never-ending progress of research. The goal is to find information needed to ask more questions, and find infinitely more possibilities between the numbers.