I clicked on this John Timmer story about the new website, “Understanding Science”, directed toward the public and K-12 educators. What I found staring at me was a giant picture of a 27-step flowchart.I’m not going to reproduce it. 

You can go over there and look if you must. I’m not kidding: “The Scientific Process” has 27 steps arranged in four interacting vortices. If you have trouble envisioning how this works, you can go to the “Understanding Science” site, and the Flash animation will helpfully take you through the 55 steps in the flowchart that Walter Alvarez used to come up with the Cretaceous impact hypothesis.

Now, if you can think of a picture to make the public and high school kids less likely to think science is something they can understand, let me know.

Science is scary!  Look:

VS.