The Unnatural Nature of Science

Science involves a special mode of thought and is unnatural for two main reasons. Firstly, the world just is not constructed on a common-sensical basis. This means that ‘natural’ thinking – ordinary, day-to-day common sense – will never give an understanding about the nature of science. Scientific ideas are, with rare exceptions, counter-intuitive: they cannot be acquired by simple inspection of phenomena and are often outside everyday experience.
. Secondly, doing science requires a conscious awareness of the pitfalls of ‘natural’ thinking. For common sense
is prone to error when applied to problems requiring rigorous and quantitative thinking; lay theories are highly
unreliable.

I would almost contend that if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn’t science. The reason,
again, is that the way in which the universe works is not the way in which common sense works: the two are not
congruent.

(Lewis Wolpert)