Science is fact. Science is truth. Science always has an answer.

As a young curious thinker, that is what appealed to me about becoming a scientist—I will find panaceas, confirm the existence of planets, and find the perfect chemical to repel mosquitoes once and for all. I spent years watching National Geographic documentaries, reading their "Science for Kids" magazines, and flipping through my sister’s biology and chemistry textbooks just for fun.

My family saw that I was a science fiend, so when a research opportunity presented itself the summer before my senior year, they naturally urged me to take advantage of it and get early hands-on experience as a "real" scientist.

I walked into my chemistry teacher's research room with aspirations—but of what, I had no idea. I only knew that I wanted a deeper involvement in the sciences to complement the traditional classroom setting; I wanted to prepare for future science classes and, perhaps, my prospective career. All I knew was that scientists have a fascinating ability to discover ostensibly impossible information.

My personal medium for discovery that summer was hot sauce. Hot sauce is my family’s second soy sauce: at Buffalo Wild Wings, the first sauce we tried was Blazin', the spiciest one available; at one point, we had about ten different brands of hot sauce in our kitchen being used simultaneously. We are extremely particular about which sauce we want with each meal because they all vary—some days call for a mild tongue kick, while other days call for a burn all the way to the toilet. Our obsession with hot sauce piqued my curiosity as to what the world’s spiciest sauce was, and that led to my personal discovery of the Scoville heat scale on Google. How, I thought, did people actually put spice levels on a numerical scale? The molecular verdict is capsaicin.

In my attempt to discover something new, I focused on finding a connection between wavelengths of light absorbed and the amount of capsaicin in six different hot sauces. Capsaicin is a molecule of pungency, and if able to be determined by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), can connect to a rating on the Scoville heat scale. This directly correlates to the amount of capsaicin in a specimen. Therefore, I ran six different hot sauces under the FTIR and examined the readings for peaks unique to the capsaicin molecule. With this, I aimed to look for a pattern that showed which hot sauces were hotter. Ultimately, the absorption readings showed no significant results that could help in differentiating hot sauces by their Scoville ratings. By the end of the summer, I concluded that FTIR analyses could notgive a relationship between a specimen's light absorption pattern and its Scoville heat rating.

All I could conclude from my "research" was that I got my desired look behind the scenes of a research scientist, despite how rudimentary. Disappointed, I walked out of Mr. Wedvik’s (my mentor) research room with nothing groundbreaking to offer to the scientific world.

It is difficult for us ordinary people with our untapped potential to justify that we have made innovations when these innovations are seen relative to the world at large.

However, it is our personal discoveries that are extraordinary, merely because we pushed ourselves to think in a new light. In a society that is big on "following" others on social media, it can feel new and unsettling to contrive innovative ideas.

In my attempt at scientific originality, I found contradictions to what the young curious thinker once believed science was. I had known it to be definite truths, solid conclusions based off of hard evidence. Instead, I saw that science is more inference than conclusion, clues rather than straight fact. I found it difficult to discern what is really true from what we only assume to be true according to observation. In fact, science became just as abstract as Jackson Pollock’s paintings—how am I supposed to know that all this actually means what I think it means?

I’m not supposed to know.

After walking out of Mr. Wedvik’s research room, I found that my inconclusive experiment did not disappoint; the realization only intrigued me further. It is no surprise that as researchers, we do not throw around words like “prove” or “cause.” There is a mystery to science that we often overlook or disregard, but it is because of this obscurity that science can traverse time. Every project holds potential, and all it takes is a dedicated researcher to be satisfied with one project, or even fail at one project, to continue and expand their scientific territories. It is not the certainty of science that now drives the young curious thinker, but the ambiguity.

To have an answer to everything, to be stubbornly attached to our findings—that is not to be a true scientist. To be a true scientist is to understand that we cannot always know for certain, but we can continue to work towards knowing. It is our persistence that keeps the science machine running. After all, we are the ones who assign words to patterns that we notice; then, we call it science.