Coffeeshop Science

This first ran September 24, 2015; since then I have stopped going to that coffeeshop and no longer see Larry and John, its chief scientists, and in fact I hardly remember what they looked like and the coffeeshop moved anyway. Time is an illusion, you say? not when so much stuff undeniably happens in it; it’s real and it’s coming after you. Anyway, this all reminds me of a story I’m working on in which a bunch of more or less ordinary guys track the satellites that the military keeps secret; the guys are out in their backyards or apartment balconies using binoculars and stopwatches. And that reminds me that citizen science is real and flourishing; and that I think people are natively scientists, they’re born scientists, that people do science the way they breathe. Somewhere in the deep pits of my mind, I still think of “scientists” as remote people whose sentences I won’t understand, and of “science” as an incomprehensible body of knowledge I have to memorize. This is probably also…