Knowledge isn’t free-you have to pay attention.
I was not a very good high school student. While I have always loved reading, I definitely lacked the discipline and focus required to get good grades in a public high school in the 1990’s. Distracted by the many joys, adventures, and challenges of adolescence, I graduated from Canfield High School with a solid with 3.1 GPA having repeated freshman algebra my junior year. An unremarkable student, there was nothing in my early years to indicate that I would eventually go on to have the academic career that I have been so very blessed with. But that is the power of American public education; a mediocre mid-western student can find her passion as an undergraduate B1G student and go on to become a leading nurse scientist …ahem…years later.
My teenage image of a scientist was someone in a white lab coat, serendipitously making discoveries that lead to human progress. However, during college -through dedicated and graduated mentorship- I learned that scientific research is an intrinsically deep and inter-connected process; a vehicle for those who understand the power of asking and answering questions to improve the human condition. These mentors helped me fall in love with science and to learn the skills to truly distinguish a real scientific signal against the noise.
How humans understand what is true in the natural, social, applied world around us has rarely been clouded by so much noise. The volume, speed, and exquisite tailoring of misinformation about our world are unparalleled. Yet the foundations of distinguishing an important signal from background noise – rigor and replicability – remain just as they did in Aristotle’s age.
According to Merriam Webster, rigor has five definitions. The one that characterizes the scientific method is that of “strict precision and exactness”. Dating back to antiquity, rigorous empirical evidence relied on exacting research methods to determine truth in the natural world. The highest form of rigor is the systematic recording of direct observation- seeing and reporting the phenomenon happen over and again. It is telling that some of the earliest examples of scientific observation, analysis, inference, and implications of data pertain to human health and illness. Precisely described observation to inform healthcare has not only existed but has been the standard of healthcare for millennia.
Replicability is often an underappreciated foundation of how science uncovers truth—it is the capacity to arrive at consistent answers when we ask the same question again and again. Consider something as common as, How does exercise affect physical function? Demonstrating that exercise improves function across ages, genders, municipalities, vocations, and socioeconomic contexts, does not happen by chance. It requires hard work, diligence, humility, and an unwavering commitment to scientific investigation. While entire research careers may be devoted to replicating and refining scientific findings, it is the subtle patterns, the careful confirmations, and the threads of evidence woven across studies, laboratories, and continents that quietly propel healthcare progress forward. In the end, truth is rarely revealed in a single moment—it is built, patiently and collectively, through collaborative science that chooses rigor over convenience and curiosity over certainty.
One of the earliest and most persistent questions children ask is simply, why? And believe me, for parents juggling full schedules, that question is often exhausting. Yet it is also a powerful reminder of something fundamental: we are, by nature, curious beings, driven to make sense of the world and to seek what is true. To reveal that truth, we must cut through the noise, the distraction, the fear of failure, and blinding hubris. Knowledge, after all, isn’t free—you have to pay careful and consistent attention to the world around us.
Somewhere along the way, many of us began to think of science as something distant or exclusive, reserved for people in lab coats with advanced degrees; we relegated truth-seeking to them. However, the fact is that science begins with simple, pure curiosity. The inflection point is often a “what if” or a “why” moment that leads us to applying rigor and replicability in our quest for understanding. In the end, when we choose curiosity over certainty and rigor and replicability over noise, we create a world where truth cannot only be found- but understood by all.