What Does Phil Plait Say Is Part of the Scientific Method?

On TED Talks Daily, Phil Plait says the scientific method includes admitting when you are wrong. Scientists, he says, bring the usual human baggage: ego, stubbornness, superstition, and tribal feeling. He illustrates the stakes with his time on the Hubble Space Telescope. A colleague thought one data set might contain the first picture of a planet orbiting another star. No such picture existed yet, so a real detection would have been a major find. Plait dug into the data. Planets are faint and stars are bright, so pulling the signal out was like hearing a whisper. The method, he says, includes paying the price of admitting you are wrong.