Question: what is it like being a scientist

Gemma Chandratillake answered on 8 Jan 2019:

I think being a scientist is a way of thinking rather than a job title! Obviously there are professional scientists who “do science” as their career but you can apply scientific thought and practice to many things that you do. We generally think about science as shedding light on the natural world but you can use the practice of questioning, observation, hypothesis generation, data gathering and analysis in many situations; if you consider humans part of the natural world, it is hard then to draw lines about when science stops and other things begin. Thinking scientifically means that instead of making assumptions about the way things are, you ask questions and test ideas. If you want to make make something happen, you can use these systematised scientific approaches to inform how best to accomplish that (e.g. marketing companies will often gather lots of data and test different approaches systematically – we don’t really call that “science” but in some ways they are studying human psychology quite scientifically).
I quite like this explanation: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/science/en/