What scientists do

How to answer this? I've found two ways, both useful.

Scientists describe, explain, and predict

Some science is just descriptive. Newton's famous mathematical model for the forces between particles of matter, his 'Universal law of gravitation,' is descriptive at heart. He tries to describe the forces between any two point masses. He was embarrassed and publicly ridiculed because it did not explain how two things could act on each other at a distance.

Scientists aren't embarrassed about that anymore. Supposedly, David Mermin, a Cornell physicist, explained the wild, mathematical excesses of quantum physics as 'shut up and calculate.' The theory described reality sufficiently to predict the outcome of experiments, to many decimal places.

Richard Feynman, the great theoretical physicist from Cal Tech, compared the big ideas of science to masturbation: OK as far as it gets you, but pretty empty. Put mathematics into it and it becomes like sex: now there is something to embrace and play with, reality.

Scientists play, pretend, and lie

I asked my high school students to make a cube out of clay and estimate how big it was, it's size. After getting over the fact that there was no 'right' answer, they came up with one, 'about an inch' or so.

Boom. Pretending. It wasn't a cube. It had twelve different lengths for the twelve different sides. No face was square. No face was even flat.

Somewhere in my wanderings through Nietzsche I ran across a quote something like this: "Truth, yes! But first we must lie." Nietzsche, in the 1840's, understood science. How can we describe the world without reducing it to a fiction, somehow.

Look up Indra's net. The Buddhists understood this. But they went in a different direction.