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surprised to learn that he graduated summa cum laude from Brigham Young University. He might be good company at a family picnic, but on this fluorescent-enhanced midweek morning, as we sit around his office coffee table engaged in what he has deemed a form of constructive entertainment, Strobel is about as much fun as an oncologist.
    Strobel has taken out his personal kit of Mastermind, a game I had never seen before and knew nothing about. He often plays the game with the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in his lab. They love it. So, I later discovered, do my husband and daughter. Now Strobel is teaching me to play Mastermind, but of the many words competing for the tip of my tongue, "love" is not one of them.
    In Mastermind, he explains, you try to divine your opponent's hidden sequence of four colored pegs by shuffling your own colored pegs among peg holes. If you guess a correct color in the correct position, your opponent inserts a black peg on his side of the board; a correct color in an incorrect position gets you a white peg; and the wrong color for any position earns you no peg at all. Your goal is to end up with four black pegs on your adversary's end in as few rounds as possible.
    "Got it?" he says, pushing the board in my direction.
    "I never really liked games," I plead. "Don't you have any nice slide presentations instead?"
    "I have a point to make with this," he says. "Go ahead."
    Without a tornado or the sudden onset of pneumococcal pneumonia to deliver me, I sigh and arrange my pegs in a pleasant police lineup of blue, red, yellow, green. Strobel responds in a pattern of blacks, whites, and blanks. I lunge with a red piece, he parries by plucking off a white peg. Green here? Sorry, dear. I'm trying my best, but I have a wooden ear for the game, and I make bad choices and no progress. I fight back tears, which fecklessly leap to freedom as sweat. I curse Strobel and all scientists who ever lived, especially the inventor of the pegboard.
    Finally, Strobel takes pity on me. "Well, I think you get the idea," he says. He sweeps the malignant little pins back into their box, and I lapse into limp remission.
    Mastermind, he declares, is "a microcosm for how science works." By insisting I play the game, he was trying to impress on me an essential truth about science. And while the dramady at Strobel's gaming table was not my favorite hour, in its intensity and memorability it reflects the strength with which scientists, whatever their specialty, agree with this truth.
    Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.
    Even more than the testimonials to the fun of science, I heard the earnest affidavit that science is not a body of facts, it is a way of thinking. I heard these lines so often they began to take on a bodily existence of their own.
    "Many teachers who don't have a deep appreciation of science present it as a set of facts," said David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at Caltech. "What's often missing is the idea of critical thinking, how you assess which ideas are reasonable and which are not."
    "When I look back on the science I had in high school, I remember it being taught as a body of facts and laws you had to memorize," said Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. "The Krebs cycle, Linnaean classifications. Not only does this approach whip the joy of doing science right out of most people, but it gives everyone a distorted view of what science is. Science is not a rigid body of facts. It is a dynamic process of discovery. It is as alive as life itself"
    "I couldn't care less whether people memorize the periodic table or not," said David Baltimore, the former president of Caltech. "I understand they're more concerned with problems that are meaningful in