I should teach the world that scientific thinking is not a fad invented by some guy wearing a powdered wig in the seventeenth century. Those who see scientific thinking in that way hope that it will end soon. They reject scientific thinking, as a transient, dangerous, dehumanising protocol, foreign to the human spirit. But scientific thinking is part of us, and has always been with us. Just because we finally named it, does not change that.

Others try to embrace scientific thinking as a recipe. They say, to be scientific, do this and then do that, but not the other way around. They talk of the scientific method, as if there is just one - as if scientific discovery were clean, orderly and uncontroversial, supervised by grizzled elders of authority. But the search for scientific discovery is anything but. It is messy, contentious and factional, but it is also wondrous, inspired, and - above all - serendipitous. It is human.

Reporters and writers love the clichés of brilliant scientists, with unkempt hair, who forget to come in out of the rain. They love the tale of a misjudged and misunderstood mind, that can see what others cannot. A thinking beyond comprehension seems all the more alien. But such thoughts, no matter how strange on the surface, are human thoughts. Scientists work hard for them. These thoughts do not just fall from a pie in the sky, of inscrutable intellectual horsepower. Scientists are human beings. They struggle and are flawed, like anyone else, but their occasional successes and flashes of brilliance are a credit to us all.

Many non-scientists, especially reporters and politicians, look to authority to decide scientific matters at the frontiers of knowledge. But there is no authority in scientific thinking, because it is thinking with your own head instead of thinking with someone else's. Scientific thinking is the resolute acceptance of our own human fallibility, and the conviction that we may rise above it by painstaking care - always checking what we think we know, and putting our dearest presumptions to the test. No human is more dangerously fallible than an academic peacock, tripping over their own plumage.

Appealing to authority in a wide-open intellectual frontier, where whole research fields may be hanging in the balance, presents a dilemma that few realise. What makes a person qualified to decide who is qualified? How do you know who is an expert and who is not, without being an expert yourself? How do you know when there are no true experts at all? You do not know. Appealing to authority does not work here - you must think with your own head. As soon as you do, the scientific journey begins for you.

Scientific thinking is what has produced the collection of knowledge that we loosely call science. That collection is a legacy of the generations, that belongs to all of us. It is the greatest human treasure. Even though we keep testing and checking it, we could not rediscover it, or figure it out in an afternoon or a generation, if we misplaced it. Yet we sometimes ask children in classrooms to rediscover, unguided, structures that took humanity a thousand generations to figure out. Nonetheless, when the labours of a thousand generations come to bear, focused white hot into the moments of our lives, then we are transformed into something grander than our individual biology could ever allow.

We mark an Einstein centenary, for the wondrous year 1905. Some of Albert Einstein's famous five articles, published in that year, were both controversial and slow to be accepted. That response, unlike the articles themselves, was business as usual. Science did not begin then, and it has not ended today. Many have trouble imagining that there is anything more to learn, as they fancy that someone, somewhere knows anything that can be imagined. But we can imagine a lot.

We know very little even of what we can imagine, never mind what we cannot. The frontier of the unknown is close by - very close by. It is all around us, waiting.

Christopher Essex is coauthor of Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming (buy this book from Amazon (USA)). See his website.