You might imagine that scientific thinking differs from the sorts of reasoning tools that you use in your everyday life — that scientists go around with a head full of equations through which they view the world. In fact, many aspects of scientific thinking are just extensions of the way you probably think everyday:
Ever seen something surprising and tried to figure out how it happened? Perhaps you've seen a magician make his assistant disappear from a box and wondered if the trick involved a trap door ….
Ever sought out more evidence (e.g., by looking for a joint in the floor beneath the box)?
Ever come up with a new explanation for a mystery? Perhaps the trick used a mirror to reflect an image of an empty wall ….
These might seem like trivial examples, but in fact, they represent scientific habits of mind applied to an everyday situation. Scientists use such ways of thinking to scrutinize their topics of study — whether that's human behavior or neutron stars — and you can use the same tools in your own life