From the moment you are born, and sometimes before, you place blind faith in the scientific method. It does not matter whether it is brushing your teeth, or fastening your seatbelt ready for a long-haul flight - you trust in the scientific method. In fact, no other scientific discovery would have been possible without it.

It is easy to forget that you were not born with an intuitive understanding of this idea of the scientific method, and that it took several centuries for science itself to refine and properly appreciate this idea. It is this rigorous method that allows scientists to pose questions and resolve them, in a way that critics, philosophers and historians cannot. This is why science, more than any other mode of knowledge - literary criticism, art, religion - yields durable, verifiable and reliable insights into the nature of things.

Without the scientific method - the process of observation, hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing - we would never had access to the world 'out there', and its many hidden secrets. Quite simply, the scientific method offers us a realistic glimpse of how we got here, and where we are going. The scientific method has freed us from our fallible commonsense approach to investigating the world.

Despite my love of the scientific method, it has its limitations. Science can describe the world in wondrous detail and complexity, yet it can never explain my subjective experience of the world to you. You will never know how I feel when I am in love, or what fresh coffee smells like to me, or how I see the redness of a red rose. To look fully at our natural world - to really know what someone is feeling, thinking, or seeing - maybe we need something more than science can offer. Maybe combining science and art goes some way towards providing that something more.

See the film by Alom Shaha in which Mark Lythgoe goes rock climbing and explains the scientific method.

Mark Lythgoe is coauthor of Mapping Perception (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)). See his website.