If Science Were A Crossword Puzzle
Incidentally, science is very similar to a crossword puzzle. When first filling out a crossword puzzle, you start tentatively, with a hypothesis, and see where it takes you. The spaces that you know help to unravel the answers to the blank spaces, in much the same way that theories in geology, like that of continental drift, helped explain how ancient species with a common ancestor could be found in distant places like Africa and South America. (The answer? The two continents were once joined!) In a sense, then, geology can inform biology, and cosmology can inform biology, and vice versa.
The questions and the size of the boxes, of course, represent the evidence. We will know how many letters and the meaning of the word in question in order to best figure out what fills the spaces, just as in science we know that evolution predicts that life would evolve in a manner so that bacteria preceded fish and fish preceded mammals. (And just as we know that the word â..Evolutionâ. is the best fit in the crossword depicted above at 3 down because it has the right number of letters and answers the clue in the best way.)
Saint Gasoline – Blog Archive – If Science Were A Crossword Puzzle