The Book · Everybody’s Science · Reference
Index of Terms
This page is generated, not typed. It is rebuilt from the manuscript, the current book PDF, and every article on this site, which is the only way the page numbers can be trusted — they move every time the book is rebuilt, and an index that is quietly out of date is worse than no index at all on a site whose whole promise is that you can check things.
Most of the definitions below are not new. 34 of them were already written, in the key-vocabulary lists of the articles they came from, and are reproduced here with a link back to that article. 13 more are terms that live in the book’s prose and have no article entry yet; those are marked draft and are waiting on a read. 47 terms in all, 44 of them appearing in the book itself.
| Term | Definition | In the book | On this site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adjuvant | A substance added to a vaccine to strengthen and prolong the immune response to the antigen it's paired with. | 55 | — |
| Antigen | A molecule the immune system recognizes as foreign, triggering antibody production and the formation of memory cells. | 57, 184 | Biology #3 — Racing a Pandemic: Alexis Kalergis, Chile's Homegrown COVID-19 Vaccine, and How It Compares to the mRNA Sprint, Biology #6 — Teaching the Immune System to See Tuberculosis: My PhD Research on the M. tuberculosis Surface, Biology #4 — Virus or Bacteria? How Doctors Tell the Difference, and Why the Treatment Depends on It, Careers #5 — Why Teaching Science Might Be the Best Decision You Ever Make |
| Antigenicity | How well a molecule is recognized and bound by an antibody once that antibody exists; a measure of how good a target the molecule makes. | 42 | — |
| Basic (fundamental) research | Research aimed at understanding how something works, without a specific commercial product in mind, as opposed to applied research aimed at a defined use. | 65–66, 130–133, 144 | — |
| Binary fission | The independent, asexual reproduction process bacteria use to divide into two identical daughter cells, requiring no host organism. | 90 | — |
| Claim-evidence-reasoning (CER) | draft The practice of making the step between what you saw and what you concluded explicit — the claim, the evidence for it, and the reasoning that connects them. | 5, 61, 158–161, 168, and throughout | Teaching #10 — Battlefield Science as a Model: How to Start a Student Research Publication, Teaching #2 — Can We Go Outside? Timing Field-Based Lessons for Biology and Chemistry Classrooms, Teaching #5 — Using CER Pragmatically in Advanced Science Courses: An AI Template for Building In-Class Activities and Assessments, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter, Teaching #1 — A Modular Index: Finding the Right Piece for Whatever You're Already Teaching, Teaching #7 — Peer Review in the Classroom: Helping Students Evaluate Each Other's Science |
| Combinatorial creativity | Generating a new idea by deliberately combining or transferring a method, question, or framework from one field into an unrelated one. | 46–47 | — |
| Comparative approach | Judging by ranking two real, available options against each other and acting on the ranking, without completing a picture of the ideal. | 116, 119 | — |
| Conceptual change | draft The research tradition on what has to be true before someone revises a belief — dissatisfaction with the old idea, and a new one that is intelligible, plausible and fruitful. | 191 | The Full Bibliography: Every Source Behind Everybody's Science, by Chapter, Teaching #11 — The Four Conditions for Changing a Mind |
| Consilience | draft Independent lines of evidence, built on unrelated methods and assumptions, converging on the same answer; William Whewell's word, from 1840. | 79, 81–82 | Evidence #6 — The Chain and the Rope — How Science Gets Confident Without Getting Proof |
| Coral bleaching | The loss of a coral's symbiotic algae (and their pigments) under thermal stress, leaving the coral's white skeleton visible through clear tissue. | 84 | index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter |
| Counterfeit convergence | draft Apparent agreement that is really one source repeated — fifty outlets carrying one press release, or one anecdote retold until repetition looks like confirmation. | — | Evidence #6 — The Chain and the Rope — How Science Gets Confident Without Getting Proof |
| Dual enrollment (DE) | A course taken in high school that simultaneously earns high school credit and actual college credit through a partner institution — in PWCS's case, Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). | 172, 177 | Careers #4 — The Real Runway: A STEM Timeline from Senior Spring to Sophomore Year, Careers #5 — Why Teaching Science Might Be the Best Decision You Ever Make, index.html |
| EPSCoR | NSF's Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, designed to help states with historically lower shares of federal research funding build competitive capacity. | 133 | — |
| Extended haplotype homozygosity | draft The genomic signature a rapid selective sweep leaves behind, detectable long after the selective event itself; the basis of the long-range haplotype test. | 92 | — |
| The four strands of science proficiency | draft The National Research Council's account of what it means to be good at science — knowing, using, and interpreting explanations; generating and evaluating evidence; understanding the nature of science; and participating in scientific practice. | 192 | — |
| Free-choice learning | draft Falk and Dierking's term for the science learning adults do voluntarily, outside school, which is where most people's science education actually continues. | 142–143, 193 | The Full Bibliography: Every Source Behind Everybody's Science, by Chapter, Teaching #8 — One-Pager, Public Good: Building Scientific Reasoning and Engineering Skills That Serve the Community |
| Growth (as a moral standard) | Dewey’s reframing of the good as a direction of improvement you can detect you’re moving along, rather than a fixed endpoint to be reached. | 42, 44, 117–118, 141, and throughout | Biology #2 — Warming Seas, Dying Reefs: Coral Bleaching and Disease Along Florida's Atlantic Coast, Careers #1 — Beyond Pre-Med: Real Careers Built on a Biology Foundation, Careers #2 — Beyond the Lab Bench: Real Careers Built on a Chemistry Foundation, Evidence #4 — Why Science Funding Should Work Like Military Readiness, Evidence #7 — Who Pays When the Grid Blinks?, Chemistry #5 — Chemistry Without Gravity: What Changes on the International Space Station, and How Student Experiments Get There … and 3 more |
| Herd immunity | The indirect protection of a population that occurs when enough individuals are immune to a pathogen that its spread is substantially slowed or stopped, even among those who aren't immune. | 6, 112 | — |
| Homochirality | The observation that life on Earth uses almost exclusively one enantiomer of key biomolecules — L-amino acids and D-sugars — rather than a racemic mixture of both. | 186 | — |
| Hypothesis space | The full set of possible questions or explanations that could be pursued within a field or problem — most of it unexplored, and only visible once you have enough background to see where the known answers stop. | 3, 43, 46, 48–49, and throughout | Everybody’s Science, Evidence #5 — Using AI Without Losing Your Own Insight: Vision, Hypothesis Space, and the Limits of the Machine, Evidence #1 — What Makes Science Good? Reaching for a Standard Nobody Ever Finishes, index.html, Teaching #13 — The Four Tools — the Method at a Glance, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter |
| Identity-protective cognition | draft The finding that people process evidence in ways that protect their standing in a group they belong to, which is why better facts alone can harden a position rather than move it. | 101, 103 | The Full Bibliography: Every Source Behind Everybody's Science, by Chapter, Teaching #12 — The Welcome Test: Two Questions, Four Things to Do |
| Immunogenicity | How effectively a molecule provokes the immune system to produce an antibody response against it in the first place. | 184 | — |
| Inductive risk | draft The idea that deciding how much evidence is enough before acting is itself a value judgment, not a purely technical one. | — | — |
| Isotope | An atom of a given element (fixed number of protons) with a specific number of neutrons, giving it a specific atomic mass; carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14 are all isotopes of carbon. | 84 | Chemistry #10 — Did Mars Have Oceans? The Chemistry of Water Across the Solar System, index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter, Teaching #8 — One-Pager, Public Good: Building Scientific Reasoning and Engineering Skills That Serve the Community |
| Lipid nanoparticle | A microscopic fatty capsule used to protect fragile mRNA and carry it across a cell membrane and into a cell. | 58 | Biology #3 — Racing a Pandemic: Alexis Kalergis, Chile's Homegrown COVID-19 Vaccine, and How It Compares to the mRNA Sprint |
| mRNA vaccine | A vaccine that delivers genetic instructions (mRNA), protected in a lipid nanoparticle, that direct a person's own cells to temporarily produce a viral protein and trigger an immune response. | 50, 58, 114 | Biology #9 — Sixty Years of Failure: How the mRNA Vaccine Really Happened, Evidence #2 — Finding Your Big Idea: A Real Method for Navigating the Hypothesis Space, index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter, Teaching #4 — Teaching Biotechnology: CRISPR, PCR, Gel Electrophoresis, and mRNA in the Biology Classroom |
| Natural selection | The process by which individuals with heritable traits better suited to their environment survive and reproduce at higher rates, changing the traits common in a population over generations. | 92–93 | Biology #10 — The Biology of Sex, Gender, and Parenthood, Teaching #6 — Talking About Misinformation Without Talking Politics: A Classroom Guide to Chapters 11–12 |
| Pasteur's Quadrant | Donald Stokes's framework describing research driven by both fundamental understanding and real-world use at once, as distinct from purely basic (Bohr's) or purely applied (Edison's) research. | 65 | The Full Bibliography: Every Source Behind Everybody's Science, by Chapter |
| Peer review | The evaluation of scientific work by independent experts in the same field, used both to decide funding and to decide what gets published. | 60–62, 67, 106 | Evidence #4 — Why Science Funding Should Work Like Military Readiness, Evidence #1 — What Makes Science Good? Reaching for a Standard Nobody Ever Finishes, index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter, Teaching #1 — A Modular Index: Finding the Right Piece for Whatever You're Already Teaching, Teaching #7 — Peer Review in the Classroom: Helping Students Evaluate Each Other's Science |
| Plasma | An ionized gas containing free electrons and positive ions, often called the fourth state of matter, that conducts electricity and responds to electromagnetic fields unlike a neutral gas. | 35 | Biology #4 — Virus or Bacteria? How Doctors Tell the Difference, and Why the Treatment Depends on It, index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter |
| pLDDT | AlphaFold's per-position confidence score for a predicted structure; high values indicate a trustworthy prediction, and low values often correctly flag a genuinely disordered or uncertain region rather than a modeling failure. | 164–165, 167–168, 170, 194 | The Full Bibliography: Every Source Behind Everybody's Science, by Chapter, Teaching #9 — The Instrument vs. the Reasoner: A Classroom AI-Literacy Protocol |
| Primary succession | Succession that begins on substrate with no pre-existing soil or living community, such as bare rock exposed by a retreating glacier. | 32, 182 | index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter |
| Proposal review board | A panel of scientists and educators who evaluate research proposals against formal criteria — scientific rigor, feasibility, and safety — before resources (such as a spaceflight opportunity) are committed to them. | 51, 98 | — |
| Protein Data Bank (PDB) | The shared international archive of protein structures determined experimentally by methods such as X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, and cryo-electron microscopy; the training data AlphaFold learned from. | 163 | — |
| Public good | A good or piece of knowledge whose benefits are difficult to restrict to whoever paid for it, which causes markets to naturally underproduce it. | 130 | Evidence #1 — What Makes Science Good? Reaching for a Standard Nobody Ever Finishes, index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter, Teaching #1 — A Modular Index: Finding the Right Piece for Whatever You're Already Teaching, Teaching #8 — One-Pager, Public Good: Building Scientific Reasoning and Engineering Skills That Serve the Community |
| The Reaching Standard | draft The idea that a good process is not aiming at a calculable greatest good but at the better of the real options in front of you, chosen now, oriented by an ideal you never finish arriving at. | 5, 116–118, 120, 133, and throughout | Everybody’s Science, Evidence #1 — What Makes Science Good? Reaching for a Standard Nobody Ever Finishes, Evidence #7 — Who Pays When the Grid Blinks?, Teaching #13 — The Four Tools — the Method at a Glance |
| Regulative ideal | Kant’s term for a standard whose function is to orient and guide inquiry rather than to be reached; it does real work while remaining permanently unfinished. | 117–119, 190 | The Full Bibliography: Every Source Behind Everybody's Science, by Chapter |
| Riparian zone | The land bordering a stream or river, where the water table and periodic flooding shape soil, vegetation, and the organisms present. | 29, 182 | index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter |
| Scientific consensus | A strong, evidence-based supermajority agreement among experts, reached through a structured, often lengthy process that explicitly preserves the right to formal dissent. | 33, 61, 83 | Evidence #6 — The Chain and the Rope — How Science Gets Confident Without Getting Proof, Evidence #1 — What Makes Science Good? Reaching for a Standard Nobody Ever Finishes, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter, Teaching #3 — Numbers Every Science Teacher Should Have on Tap: Deep Time, Molecules, and the Air in Your Lungs |
| Second-order evidence | draft Evidence not about a claim itself but about whether the people making it are trustworthy on it — the epistemology of testimony, which is what most readers actually have to work with. | — | — |
| Serendipity | draft Not the lucky break, but Robert Merton's sense: the trained capacity to notice that an unanticipated result is telling you something, and to go after it instead of filing it. | 44, 125, 185 | Everybody’s Science |
| Suess effect | The measurable dilution of carbon-14 in atmospheric CO2 caused by the combustion of radiocarbon-dead fossil fuels, used as direct isotopic evidence of the source of rising CO2 levels. | 81–82, 84 | Evidence #6 — The Chain and the Rope — How Science Gets Confident Without Getting Proof |
| Vision | A person's value-driven sense of which questions, among all possible ones, are actually worth pursuing — the part of research direction this reading argues AI cannot supply on its own. | 3, 47–48, 122, 191 | index.html, Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter |
| The Welcome Test | draft Two questions for a claim you cannot check yourself — does the claim survive testing, and does the person making it welcome the test — which judge a claimant's relationship to being checked rather than the claim's truth. | 5, 100–106, 110, 127–128, and throughout | Everybody’s Science, index.html, Teaching #13 — The Four Tools — the Method at a Glance, Teaching #12 — The Welcome Test: Two Questions, Four Things to Do |
| Z-score | A statistical measure of how many standard deviations a value falls above or below its group's mean; used here to make reviewers with different scoring habits comparable. | 60 | Look Around You: Reflection Questions and Companion Reading for Every Chapter |
| Zooxanthellae (Symbiodinium) | Photosynthetic dinoflagellate algae that live inside coral tissue in a mutualistic relationship, supplying the coral with most of its energy. | 83 | — |
Book page numbers refer to the current reader PDF of Everybody’s Science and will change as the manuscript does; this page is regenerated with each build. Definitions marked draft were written for this index rather than harvested from an article, and have not yet been through a read. A term’s article list is generated by searching every page on the site, so it catches uses the author did not think to cross-reference — and occasionally an ordinary-language use of a technical word.