We’ve been together for a while now, you and I. We’ve done some good, hard work, and I feel we’ve earned the right to step back and take a swing at one of the bigger questions, namely: What is Science?

Now, as mentioned, I’ve been doing this a while, and I’m aware that some readers will already be reaching for their trusty Crayola to inquire in block capitals whether I mightn’t have asked this question somewhat earlier in the game. Before the column on how to cut one’s hair, perhaps, or the meditation on thinking.

But I would recommend patience, should you be one of those readers. By all means write the letter, but I would read the whole article before affixing a valuable stamp to the envelope. For as bare as you think I’ve laid myself by using the pages of a magazine about Science to wonder in print what Science is, you have not—to paraphrase the great Bachman-Turner Overdrive—seen anything yet.

Because while I may not know exactly what Science is, I am far more confident in stating the following: that it needs to be gotten rid of.

My journey to this lonely precipice of modern thought began last week, with an article in the paper about government efforts to “reverse the long-term decline in the number of children studying science.” Youngsters are feeling “turned off” by Science at the moment, apparently, and as a result are not lining up in droves to study it (a topic much discussed in this very magazine last month). This claim struck me as odd because I could have sworn that while flying a red-eye across the Atlantic (the ocean) I’d read an article in The Atlantic (the magazine) by Virginia Postrel declaring that science is in fashion and that more young people than ever were choosing to study it.

To resolve the discrepancy I made use of a rather ingenious technique from comparative literature that was taught to me many years ago by a drunken grad student. I took the article from the newspaper and Virginia Postrel’s article from The Atlantic—the two “texts,” if you will—set them next to each other on a table—“juxtaposition” is the term—then spent a few minutes looking back and forth between the two trying to work out what the hell was going on.

The truth quickly revealed itself. The two texts were not in conflict after all. Postrel’s claim was only that there was a spike in the number of people applying to study the weird little field of forensic science—not Science as a whole; that latter figure, in the U.K., is indeed declining, and in the United States is merely holding steady even as the pace and scope of science explodes. And her suggestion of a new public enthusiasm for science was supported entirely by the success of TV shows like CSI and Numb3rs, in which geeky, obsessive brainiacs use science to track down psychotic killers who are dismembering young, attractive, too-naive members of society. So yes, crime-solving science is hot right now. Not to mention the kind of practical science involved with computers and cell phones and plasma TVs.

But Science itself? That’s about as fashionable as Osama bin Laden doing the Macarena. In fact, Science has been facing down an image problem for decades now. In the 1950s, it seems not to have mattered much. Whatever high schoolers thought of science and scientists, enough of them had changed their minds by college time (prodded, no doubt, by the promise of personal robot slaves and the peril of raining Soviet nukes) to staff American Science for another generation.

But not anymore. These are less serious times, when adolescent attitudes can persist well into middle age and beyond. Science’s perpetual image problem has blossomed into an urgent image crisis.

So what is to be done?

I see two mutually exclusive courses of action. The first solution, the messy one, the one that frankly isn’t going to work, would be a radical redesign of Science. I’m not talking about more or better “outreach,” especially not to “the kids.” If another owl in a mortarboard pops up and tells me “Science is cool, you know,” when all I’m trying to do is eat my huevos rancheros and watch a little SpongeBob on a Saturday, I’m going to shoot it. No, I’m talking about an overhaul of the image of Science from top to bottom. Laboratories where people actually want to hang out, for instance, where there’s a chance your chair will have cushioning on it, where the lighting doesn’t make everyone look like a large-pored vampire, where there’s something to listen to other than the buzz of the lights and the twang of the aluminum walls. Even smooth jazz would be better.