A Brief Explanation of Everything: Vol. 5 Botany

Trying to explain everything about science, briefly, turned out to be a greater challenge than I had supposed. It wasn’t too hard to explain math, physics, chemistry, and geology briefly. Math may seem infinite, but that is imaginary. In truth it isn’t even a science, it just a lot of abstract ideas that scientists sometimes find handy for comparison purposes.
Then physics is just made up of a handful of laws and forces. All of chemistry is made up of just over a hundred elements. I admit Geology was a bit of a challenge because it is such a messy topic. Nothing is seldom one thing. Everything is a conglomerate of sorts. And then there are all the difficult people to deal with.
Then I hit the life sciences. Whew, boy! Do you know how many types of living things there are? Millions and millions of types, let alone individuals. Then there is the variability. Scientists have tried to come up with some grand unifying theory of life, but they aren’t unified. I think evolution was supposed to be the grand unifier, but it keeps evolving.

Thankfully, the basic premise of this series does not change. Those premises are:

• science simply is not as breathtakingly serious and you might think,
• there is far less romance and violence than movies would lead you to believe,
• scientists are just people with the same flaws as everyone else,
• anyone can do science anytime they wish,
• you can waste as much time and money doing science as you can playing golf,
• and the problems all arise from money and power. (Duh!)