Science is not to be believed. (That's Bill Nye the science guy.)

Science is about proof, and more important, it's about use. The best answers are those that result in new questions, new experiments, new discoveries, new inventions.

Science is filled with ambiguity. We don't know what we don't know. And science can "change its mind." It has many times, in our lifetime, and it will continue to do that.

But while science is not to be believed, those who don't believe in science, those societies that don't value it, nurture it, and embrace it, are doomed.

Science doesn't care about Jesus, or Jefferson. So when you read that the U.S. is losing its lead in science, be very, very afraid.

The U.S. maintained its lead in science far beyond the ability of its people by importing great scientists, and through public policies that embraced science, that funded scientists, and that gave them the freedom to inquire.

The price of our times' dalliance with politically-correct science, with religiously-correct science, with our suspicion of foreigners and our funding priorities that value short-term gain over long-term pain, is only now starting to be felt.

It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, even if we change course now, because science doesn't care about America. Science takes time to learn, it takes time to do, it takes time to validate. Science, as opposed to engineering, offers no guarantees. Science is the biggest policy boat in the world, it takes decades to turn, so even the anti-science policies of the last decades -- cutting long-term science for short-term, valuing patents over open inquiry, de-funding science education -- haven't shown any apparent impact until now.

In that way, the cooling of science is like global warming. You don't notice its impact, you can't prove it's real, until it's far too late to do anything about it in the short-term. And if that doesn't fit with your political agenda, too bad.

Science doesn't care.