Last week, President Obama stated in his inaugural address that he would “restore science to its rightful place.” ScienceBlogs has been quick to capitalise on his words by launching a new initiative called The Rightful Place Project. As an opening salvo, the Project is asking writers, bloggers and scientists from all over the world to answer this innocuous question:

Many of the others have had their say, and here’s my take.

Science has different sides to it. On the one hand, you have the experiments and their results; the people and their stories; the ins-and-outs of discoveries; all the various minutiae of existence. These are the sorts of details that I write about here all the time. They are what I breathe