I'm Amaleah Hartman. I teach introductory laboratory biology at Yale, which means I spend my days watching young scientists meet real data for the first time and discover that it's not exactly like the textbook.

Science isn't a collection of facts and things we know; it's a set of methods for asking a question and finding out. Those methods usually lead to more uncertainty and more questions on the way to an answer, which is a large part of why the process is more interesting than it looks from outside. A number or a cartoon schematic on a page always comes from somewhere, after-all. Someone chose what to measure, how to measure it, how confident to be about it, and publish it. I think that's the most fascinating part, and it's the part that almost never makes it into the tidy version in your book.

So, this is where I write about how the knowing actually happens: the instruments, the mistakes, the arguments about what counts as evidence. The story behind what we know.

It's for anyone curious, whether or not you've been near a lab.

You can reach me at hartmaah@gmail.com.