Part I: What is science
Science is hard to define. First, let me tell you what it is not:
Boring
A body of knowledge
A collection of facts
A collection of theories
How we learn about our world
How the world works
A way to invent new things
Something very different than the humanities
Hypotheses and experiments
A natural way of thinking
This last “anti-definition” is important; I will return to it later.
All animals need to learn basic rules for how the world works. I distinctly remember the day when my infant son repeatedly lifted his hand and watched it fall down after turning it limp. Oh, I said to myself, he is learning about gravity! Was he really? I can’t be sure but we can all be certain that learning about gravity is essential for all of us. We learn about air pressure from the wind and our breath. We learn that water freezes when it is cold enough. We learn that lightning and volcanoes can start fires. These things, and so many more, we learn through observation. They are important things about our natural world but they are not science.
The first people to write about “science” were not scientists. Some credit Aristotle with the title of first scientist but thinking hard about the world and deciding how it works is more akin to philosophy than it is to science. In fact, science is a human invention. Although science is based on fundamental mechanisms of human cognition, such as supposition, story telling, logic, it is not a natural way of thinking. Science is a process of discovery but science itself had to be “discovered”. Importantly, so did painting, sculpture, poetry, etc. Many consider Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) to be the first scientist. He was certainly a key figure in its development. One website makes a good argument for William Gilbert (1544-1603) https://science.howstuffworks.com/first-scientist1.htm. Perhaps.
Here is what science is: a proven way to successively approach a more complete understanding of a subject. Science is a means of effective thought and as such it is practiced by scientists and many non-scientists alike. Science is self-correcting. Science can (barely) be practiced by lone individuals but it requires a fellowship of trained thinkers who can evaluate, question, and elevate collective thinking and understanding.
When children are first taught about science what do they learn? The scientific method, a lesson that I believe is responsible for turning more people into life-long science avoiders than any other. Besides being boring, as a definition it is woefully incomplete and leaves unsaid the most important, and in fact the coolest and most exciting aspect, of science.
Here is my definition of science:
Science is the pursuit of understanding that requires successful and verified prediction of outcomes.
Prediction is a cognitive capability required for survival and most likely extremely ancient. When it turns dark and windy animals know it is going to rain. Chimpanzees know that they will pay a price if they eat out of hierarchical turn. This kind of associating is also a means of understanding what will happen. It is prediction. People have always yearned for means to predict the otherwise unknowable. Reading entrails, taking psychoactive substances to enter a trance, consulting the oracles, reading star pattens were/are all efforts to predict the future. Even though none of these methods work they were practiced for ages (and some continue to be) because the concept of “verifiable prediction” was not understood and no means to do it was invented.
The invention of science occurred when people realized that accurately predicting an outcome provides a level of certainty to a supposition. If I believe that massive (heavy) and less massive (lighter) objects will fall at the same rate in a gravitational field it is a supposition. If I state the supposition in a way that allows it to be tested it becomes a scientific hypothesis, and if I design multiple experiments to test it, and in each case my hypothesis accurately predicts what I later observe, it becomes a theory.
Science doesn’t really traffic in “facts”. Scientists start with observations, data. They try to tell a story that explains the facts, a supposition if you will. Then they state the supposition in a way that is testable; they predict that if their supposition is correct they should observe a specific outcome. In order to verify their prediction they state their supposition in a specific way called a hypothesis. If the outcome of the experiment follows the prediction the hypothesis is confirmed. If not it is rejected.
One successful prediction must be followed by others. Our confidence in our ideas are strengthened by multiple successful predictions, especially when they are performed by different people using different methods. Over time if an idea continues to successfully predict outcomes and leads to new understanding it becomes enshrined as a theory. Importantly, a theory is not a fact and can always be replaced if it fails to predict the outcome of a new test.
A theory that has been replaced by a better one does not necessarily become useless or “wrong”, just less good at prediction. A great example is Sir Isaac Newton’s (1643-1727) laws of motion. Newton’s physics were based on his understanding of space and time and correctly predicted the outcomes of experiments for around 200 years. His laws of motion accurately predicted our everyday experiences but were based on false assumptions: that space is fixed and time is invariant. At the dawn of the 20th century new observations, for example a better understanding of the orbit of mercury, suggested that Newton’s physics may not successfully predict outcomes in some circumstances. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) proposed a new understanding of space and time in the early 20th century that did successfully predict the orbit of mercury. His theory of relativity was based on the assumptions that the speed of light in a vacuum, not time, is invariant, and that space is not fixed. While neither of these assumptions have any bearing on our everyday experiences they do have important implications for special circumstances and for how accurately our depictions match reality. When Einstein’s relativity also successfully predicted the outcomes of entirely new experiments (for example that gravity bends light) it replaced Newton’s physics as our best understanding. Notably, Newton’s physics is still used for many purposes (e.g. sending spacecraft to study distant planets) because it is simple and accurate enough to do that even though a better theory exists. It is not used to estimate our location using GPS because it is not good enough for that purpose; for GPS we must use Einsteinian physics.
Repeated successful, verified predictions are science. So far, this way of thinking has proved to be the most efficient and successful method yet devised to learn new things and advance our technologies.
In Part II will address why it makes us fight so much.
Loved the poetry, the way it was presented. It ha combined humor, humanity and science; best of all I it pushed me to think about “stuff “ I avoided thinking about.
Thank you for your kind words. I do hope that this will be a new way of thinking about science and the humanities. They both emanate from exactly the same place
As a 9th grade biology teacher, your 1st question (what is science) is literally the first question I ask my students on the first day of class. I get a lot of diverse responses – they often try to come up very complicated responses to try and impress me, but the one thing they all have in common is that it is a noun. I prefer to think of science as a verb and the simplest definition is “an active process of learning”.
WHAT??? You can aim a spaceship w Newtonian physics but you need Einstein for GPS? ??? How is that possible???? No wonder I majored in Chemistry and got a D in Physics!
Like Gary, I would not vote for Aristotle as a scientist, he was a philosopher enshrouded in thoughts and imagined how things work without seeking a proof. However, I would definitely vouch for Archimedes as a scientist and a major one at that. When I was young I read that when asked by his colleagues philosophers how is he so sure that the cone has 1/3 of the cylinder volume he said, that to make sure he did the measurement; upon which the philosophers said that philosophy does not seek the truth through measurements but through pure logic. I would say that these philosophers definitely would not qualified as scientists.
On your claim that science had to be invented, I feel ambivalence. Perhaps you can elaborate some more about this.
Also, maestro GOOGLE provided the following definition for science
“the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”
To me it looks like a perfectly reasonable definition. It would be interesting to get your comment on this definition.
Yedidia,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I will discuss them in reverse order.
Google’s definition of science fails in several aspects. First, what is an experiment? If you Google experiment (or just go to Wikipedia) you will find much electronic ink spilled over efforts to define experiment. A good rule of thumb is that a definition that uses a term that itself requires definition is not an ideal definition. Furthermore, when we do experiments, what are we doing? THe best experiments are structured to test a hypothesis. In other words, we are trying to verify or refute a prediction. (Sound familiar?) WHen we do experiments that are not hypothesis testing (one can reasonably argue whether these are truly experiments) we are collecting observations in order to build new suppositions that we can subject to rigorous testing.
Secondly, Google relegates science to “the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world”. What is not part of the physical and natural world? I would argue that nothing exists beyond that realm. If you consider pure thought (e.g. philosophy or similar pursuits) to be. Beyond that realm I would counter with the facts that they are the products of our minds and therefore are the behaviour of the natural world. I would argue that nothing lies beyond the physic al and natural world and therefore, everything is a subject for scientific inquiry. So this part of the definition is problematic as well.
For a short elaboration on the fact that”science” is invented I refer once again to Aristotle who had so much to say about the nature and structure of the “natural” world. Aristotle was so persuasive that his ideas held sway for many centuries. But Aristotle did not understand (or at least partake in) the value of verifiable prediction and hence many of his ideas were not refuted until people realised the power of this approach.
Thanks so much for bringing up Archimedes! Indeed, he was an unparalleled mathematician, engineer, and inventor. Is math a scientific pursuit? Most thinkers do not consider it to be. The process of invention shares some aspects of science. It certainly involves trial and error. Archimedes may have inherently understood the concept of verifiable prediction but he did not state it or practice it explicitly. I have little doubt that there were people who had an inherent understanding of verifiable prediction prior to the 17th century but this methodology did not take hold until then.
I would take Gary’s point even further. If you just google for the definition of experiment, you find something interesting. “a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact.” Now , since the word experiment is used in the definition of science and since the word science appears in the definition of experiment, it create a cyclic argument that disqualifies these definitions.
AND, while at it, I googled the definition of DEFINITION, here what I found “a statement of the exact meaning of a word, especially in a dictionary.” I think that this statement is utterly wrong. I would like to hear Gary on that one.
Since Gary is opening out appetite, I wondered how Einstein pondered the issue of what is exactly science (I know he did and I know that he followed Mach approach). I found the following link for ” Einstein’s Philosophy of Science” the link is, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/ . Looks like Gary is up to something in his quest for truescience.
I love this blog, it says many of the ideas that I have but have not had the time to think thru.