During an interview for the Boston Globe, the reporter asked me whether working on the new frontier of interstellar objects in search for extraterrestrial gadgets resulted in a different experience than my academic work on other topics. I replied that I approach all scientific matters the same way. Unlike the political matters addressed by University presidents in Congress last December, the scientific method does not depend on context.
In all scientific matters, science is based on proposing theoretical hypotheses, collecting evidence, analyzing the data and interpreting it as a test of the proposed hypotheses. If the data stands in conflict with all existing theories, it is regarded as anomalous, potentially requiring a conceptual revolution.