if you could preserve only one single sentence, I would push for: ‘The natural world is not governed by whimsical gods, but is essentially mechanical and can therefore be understood and then predicted by people, using careful observation, experimentation, and measurement, and importantly by testing your explanations to try to refute them.’ It’s this reiterative process of refinement that sets science apart from any other system for explaining how the world works.
Buzzfeed: I Asked 12 Scientists: What Is The One Fact Humanity Needs To Know?
That’s a pretty good one sentence description of the scientific method,
