Earlier this year I applied to be a NYC Teaching Fellow for the subject of high school science. The following is a transcription of the five-minute teaching demo I was asked to present. Unfortunately, I was not offered a position.

Honestly, I was disappointed. I think I make a great teacher. And since this is my website, I can go ahead and say anything to that effect, as much as I want: “Michael Zannettis is an amazing science teacher,” says Michael Zannettis, “and if Michael Zannettis were hired to teach high school science, he would have been nominated ‘Teacher of the Year’ in his rookie campaign.”

There would have been a movie made from his experience starring the love child of Morgan Friedman, Matthew Broderick, and Edward James Olmos. 

Today in class we are going to learn how to be scientists. We are not going to cut open any frogs or mix any chemicals or look through any telescopes. What we’re going to do is take a look into the way we think. Being a scientist isn’t about touching messy things or wearing a lab coat: it’s about thinking the right way. Scientists have two hands of logic, a right and a left, and we’re going to learn how to swing them about.

The foundation of thinking the ‘right’ way, of being a scientist, is correctly answering this question: Which one of the following two statements is true?

(a) The Earth is flat.

Almost every single person alive today will tell you that the correct answer is, B, The Earth is round. But is it? To get to class today, I walked down the street and that street seemed pretty flat. When I drive on the highway, I don’t think to myself, Wow, this Earth is round. In actuality, the Earth seems pretty flat to me. When an architect designs a building, he doesn’t draw a round line for the Earth. The architect draws a nice flat line on the blueprint.  See that’s the Earth. That’s where the building goes. The Earth is flat. Plan accordingly.

For almost all of our everyday experiences, including the incredibly practical, like walking, the engineering, like driving a car, or the scientific, like doing a land survey, we deal with a flat Earth.

That’s because it’s true: The Earth is flat.

So why, when people are asked, do most of them say that the Earth is round?

It’s because we have pictures of Earth from space. Clearly, we can see that the Earth is definitely a giant sphere, an orb, a globe—any way you cut it, the Earth is round. And contrary to the stories about Christopher Columbus fearing sailing off the edge of the world, we’ve known that the Earth is round for a very, very long time.

The ancient Greeks measured shadows in the sand to compute the circumference of the Earth accurate within a couple thousand miles. Even sailors understood the Earth was round because they watched ships disappear over the horizon.

But how can it both be true that the Earth is round and that the Earth is flat? Isn’t this a rather unscientific truth? Not at all. This is exactly how science works.

Science doesn’t say: “This is true and therefore this is false.” What science says is: “This is more true than any other explanation.”

It’s true that the Earth is flat. But it’s more true that the Earth is round.

But then again, if you think the Earth is round, you’re not exactly right either. That’s because the Earth is neither flat nor round. The Earth is oblong.

The Earth is a mass that is orbited by another mass. That mass, the moon, pulls on the Earth’s mass, giving it an oblong shape. In pictures of the Earth from outer space we can’t really tell that the Earth is oblong, but nonetheless, if you measure correctly, you’ll find that indeed it is. The Earth is only round in the general sense.

Therefore, while it’s true that the Earth is flat, it’s more true that the Earth is round, and it’s most true that the Earth is oblong.

Understanding that science is about ranking the accuracy of truth is the essence of being a scientist. That’s why Isaac Asimov once said, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘Those who said the Earth is flat, were wrong. Those that said, The Earth is round, were wrong. But if you think that saying the Earth is round, is just as wrong as saying the Earth is flat, then you’re more wrong than both of them.’

If you think of scientists as having two hands of logic, then that Asimov’s Axiom is the right hand. Let’s take a look at what the other hand is doing.

(b) There is a 99.99999% probability that if I have 2 of something and add 2 more to that, I will then have 4 of it.

I know what you’re going to say: “But Mr. Zannettis you just said that we, as scientists, are about ranking truth. Therefore, I would say that the most true is at the top, and the least true is at the bottom.”

To which I would reply: “Wrong, sucker! They’re all equally true.”

2+2=4, is what we call a mathematical truth. Within the logic of mathematical systems the statement makes perfect sense. In other words, Whenever you are doing math, when you add two with two, you will get four. If you do not get four, then you are violating the rules of math.

The second statement, is what is called a scientific truth. Scientists don’t speak in absolute terms. What scientists do is measure how certain they are of a particular outcome or a specific phenomenon. In this case, the scientist is extremely certain. The scientists is confident that if they possessed a quantity of two, and added another two, the result would be four, and that the possibility of that result not happening is one in a million billion trillion gajillion bofamagillion.

Nonetheless, the scientist, according to the logic of doing science, can never say two plus two equals four. At least, not logically. The scientist must instead state how certain they are that taking two and adding another two will produce four.

This brings us to the last statement, 2+2=5, which seems to be completely contradictory to the first statement, 2+2=4.

It’s not. Or, if is contradictory, then it’s contradictory on purpose. 2+2=5 is a political truth. Within the logic of politics it makes perfect sense. What is true is what the people in power say is true, independent of any outside logic, like math, that would contradict this truth. The rules of political truth are simply: What we say is true, is true. All animals are created equal is a political truth. All animals are created equal, but some are created more equal than others, is another political truth.

One political truth is true within the logic of one political system, democracy, and the other political truth is true within the logic of another political system, fascism.

Let me remind you that what held back the beginnings of the scientific revolution was the churches of Europe, who actively suppressed scientific truth to preserve their own form of truth. Understanding that scientific truth is vulnerable to political truth is one aspect of being a scientist. It was that way for Copernicus and Galileo and continues to be that way to this day for Darwin and all his intellectual descendants.

What we discover as scientists to be true, or rather, to be most true of all possible truths, is worth nothing if we, as a society, cannot defend it against political truths, which are true only because the people that hold power, say that they are true.

This is the left hand of being a scientist: Understanding the different textures of truth. You can think of it in qualitative and quantitative terms: The left hand determines the type of truth and the right hand measures the certainty of that truth. It is wielding these two hands of logic, that makes one a scientist. One, two, a right and a left.

Thinking like a scientist means that you see the whole world in a completely different light. I hope so, because the more people that think like scientists, the more the scientific logic becomes a common language in our society, the more intelligent our lives will become. But that’s all for now. Today, we learned how to punch. Tomorrow, we’re going to learn how to arm wrestle.