I like the metaphor of setting sail into unknown waters.

Imagine knowledge as the discovery and mapping of unknown waters and lands. The fringes of knowledge — which is where the science really happens — is like standing on the coast looking out to uncharted oceans, without a map. Out there somewhere, is new land, waiting to be discovered, but no one knows where it is. The only way to discover it is to go out there into the unknown and look for it. But in which direction do you set sail? Do you go north? Or east? Or south? Or west? That’s where you have to take a leap of faith. But it’s not a blind leap of faith. You look at everything you've learnt so far. You look to see if there are sea birds flying in from any direction, if there is any driftwood hitting your shores and where they came from. You can even try to model the currents and winds to see where the driftwood might have come from. You can build telescopes to try and see further into the distance. You can theorize based on the geology of the coastlines, which side is more likely to have separated from the mainland. Armed with all of these bits of information you make many hypotheses, and ultimately you need to pick one direction — often including your gut feeling— and set sail in that direction.

Hopefully this will be an informed decision, not a complete guess, but you could be wrong. While out at sea, you might make new observations, which could lead you to reconsider your original trajectory. You might hear from another ship miles ahead of you reporting that there is nothing in the direction you’re heading. Realizing this while you’re out at sea and adjusting your trajectory is not a weakness, it’s a strength.

It may be that you discover the specific land that you were looking for, which is great (like the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, 40 years after setting sail). Or it may be that you don’t find the land you were looking for, but instead find something completely the opposite, which is often more exciting (like in 1998 discovering that the universe expansion is accelerating when in fact you were trying to measure how much it is decelerating). Or it may be that you sail for decades, constantly feeling like you are within reach of land, but never actually finding it (like those poor string theorists).

But even that is not a waste. Because continuously, while you’re out on sea, you’re sending home information on everything you find, everywhere you go, and everything that goes wrong. Even if you sail uncharted territories for centuries and never find land, that is still new information. We can learn from that. Because before, we didn't know anything about what was in those territories, but now we know that it’s nothing. Now we learn not to go there again in the future ☺. Or if you sailed for decades and failed, drowning in an unpredicted thunderous storm, others can go back there in the future with a more storm resilient ship. If you sailed for decades only to be eaten by a giant sea monster, others can go back there in the future after they've built an anti-giant sea monster weapon.

And most importantly, there isn't only one ship out there exploring the uncharted waters. There’s thousands, perhaps millions. Science is simply the accumulation of the collective knowledge of all of those ships.