Dear Scientists,

My favorite word in science is “imagine.” Yesterday I was reading a book about our moon’s formation and the text said, “imagine you saw it from Earth.” Imagine you saw the large planetesimal hurtling towards Earth, growing larger and larger as it approached, until it crashed into Earth in the biggest collision you could imagine, breaking off chunks of earth that orbited in a ring before forming together to make an orbiting moon.

We like to think science is all about facts, observations, and hard data. And those things are true. But if we didn’t use that evidence to tell stories, then none of it would matter much.

Most of what we study is too large, too small, too far away, or too much a part of us to study really closely. Unless you have a magic school bus, you can’t enter the human body or travel back to the time of dinosaurs. So instead we gather evidence and put it together to tell a story of how things got to be the way they are.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck