It is one of the curious oddities of our time that we talk so much about the scientific method as if it is one singular entity when, in point of practice, it is anything but. The ultimate linchpin in science is decided not by how we go about doing it, but about how well our hunches, observations, and results tally with the universe we observe and, in turn, how such intellectual lurches compare and contrast with other competing stratagems in terms of yielding more, not less, information. The very word science, derived from the Latin "scire" (see the Oxford English Dictionary for more on its etymology), is rather open ended and simply means "knowledge."