Fundamentally, science is a form of transcultural communication. It is a way of persuading someone that one judgement is more suggestive than another.
Instead of trying to persuade another by appealing to common cultural understandings, or by appealing to a widely accepted authority, a scientific communication strives to generate an internal experience of some sort within the listener.
This is strong, since an internal experience is undeniable.
The advantage of science as a method of persuasion is that it is robust. If you have a good reputation, many will simply accept your assertion because of your authority. Indeed, adults almost always depend on others when forming their opinions. Others may not trust you, but are open minded; they will follow your reasoning, or duplicate your observation, or repeat you experiment.
Modern physicists are often open minded. As one correspondent said,
Shelly Glashow was almost laughed off the stage for proposing Electroweak at a conference. A year later, almost everyone agreed that he was right. Within a few years it was called "The Standard Model."
But sometimes the other person thinks you are wrong and will not listen. The other person may be an enemy. Non-scientific forms of communication then fail.
An enemy will never accept your authority. He or she will not accept your world view. Nothing that you can say will come across. Your enemy has various reasons to think you are wrong and will not change.
Such people are unreachable. But their students are another matter. Students and other young people often `cause trouble' — they may not listen to their `betters'. They are the ones you may reach. (This is not invariable. Some cultures are so strong that very few within them change. But it is a tendency.)
One of your enemy's students may well think though the same problems as you, or make similar observations, or, most effectively for your attempt at changing minds, conduct experiments that confirm your results.
A student tends to follow his or her teacher, but if you come up with a good set of experiments or a good set of observations that the student can replicate or that people the student respects can replicate, then the student may come to believe you.
Because scientific communication enables one person to recreate another's experience, it is the best form of transcultural communication yet known.
Let me be more specific: for robust communications, scientists use three methods to generate internal experience in another listener.
Either
As I said, this method of communication fails when directed towards someone who will not listen, reason, or experiment. But in most societies, some will listen.
We can list the various ways of learning. The two most common are:
Neither of the two common methods succeed well across cultures.
The scientific ways of inducing internal experience are three fold. It is vital that the person reasoning, observing, or doing follow in your footsteps. Only by doing this can anyone be sure of replicating another's experience, and thereby checking it.
As a practical matter, most people accept new beliefs because they come from a trusted authority. No one had the resources or the time to reason, observe, or experiment. For most people, existing knowledge and technology are simply another gift of their culture. Knowledge and technology are accepted, like other beliefs.
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