What is Science?
The answer given to this question seems to be wrong by a great many people.
It seems are many on our lovely forums who believe that the answer is something along the lines of:
Having a guess at how the world works.
Or possibly:
Thinking up theories of how things happen.
Maybe even they think:
A practical point of view.
Or:
An interpretation of the current theory with words.
Are really what science is about.
And the school system that so many of us go through teaches us that science is just learning lots of facts. And possibly the people who do it in “the real world” have a guess at how the world works and come up with “theories”.
Well sorry everyone but that’s not what science is.
And what you think a theory is, that’s wrong too.
At this point I’m going to referre to wikipedia, I know this is not a good place to go if you want to take the true moral or intellectual high ground, but I feel it’s good enough in this case (thanks swansont for posting this in a thread):
“A theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behaviour of a related set of natural or social phenomena. It originates from or is supported by experimental evidence”
So, a theory is predictive (tied up in the model) (that means it needs maths, we require more these days than “if you push it it’ll move, we need F=ma), it has to have evidence, I know some people find this hard to understand, and saying:
Well it just seems like that to me.
Or similar is not evidence, it’s anecdotal. At best what most people think of as a theory is conjucture.
Evidence and experiments are at the heart of modern physics, as is So that’s what a theory is.
Now what about science? Well I’m a physicist, so my view is going to be skewed by that science, so in my oppinion science is:
The study, of the natural world. By means of modelling observable phenomena.
So if you can’t observe it, it’s not science.
This means that what you do in school for the most part is not science.
What you do in university for the most part is not science. Science is all about discovery.
You discover some experimental evidence that no one ahs ever seen before and apply a theory to it, and you discover that the theory doesn’t or does work. If it doesn’t work the theory is incomplete, and needs something else, if it’s a new untested model the model might just be plane wrong!
Evidence and experiments are at the heart of modern physics, as is mathematical modelling. Without either of these it’s not physics.
Words are nice, but you can’t test them, saying that you’re explaining the underlying truth of what the experiments show, without any maths, is just word play, you could say it was done by gnomes and you’d have as sounder footing as saying anything else.
Physics is trial by fire, if you have an idea expect alot, of probably hostile questions, repeating yourself, saying “it follows that” and not showing how or just saying it’s obvious is not a defence, that’s not how science works. You need evidence.
Evidence and maths. If you’ve got both you might be doing science, if you’ve got one you might be doing science, and certainly could be heading towards doing science, if you’ve got neither you’re not.
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April 3rd, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I was reading a book and it had two pages filled with quotes from various scientists giving their definition on what Science is.
The first one was:
“Science is organized knowledge”