Week+2+assignment

Michael Fowler’s summary of ancient science brings up several interesting points about the nature of science in general. First, it provides an example of science progressing from superstition to reason. However, the reasons given were not so much rational as they were just further from relying on gods. Also, some of the more abstract theories like theories about the heavens had no specific basis in fact. They were more of a hypothetical and mathematical solution that satisfies the data, but has no actual physical evidence. The question that this brings up, then, is how “scientific” does science have to be? Is the sole qualification for science simply the lack of mention of some kind of deity? This definition seems silly, because it makes no qualification toward the truth or falsity of the science in question. The line between science and non-science seems like it’s very blurred. Some things are clearly science, like Newton’s law of gravity. Other things, like Anaximander’s theory of a cylindrical universe, are a bit more blurry. Anaximander’s theory explains the astronomical data about the stars and planets moving in seemingly circular paths, but there was nothing to substantiate Anaximander’s theory more so than any other theory. So the question is: how testable does science have to be in order to be considered science, and how tested does a theory have to be before it is science? At the time, Anaximander’s theory was un-testable, untested, and therefore I think that it is not fully science. That’s not to say that it is superstition, but it is just somewhere in the middle. Just because something satisfies the data doesn’t make it true or necessarily scientific. Again, this brings up the famous question: “what is science?” I don’t quite feel comfortable answering this question with complete conviction right now, but I will put this forth for the sake of argument: Science is a system which takes past events, and then categorizes and organizes them into a theory which is tested and proven as far as we can measure, and this theory can then be used to make predictions about the natural world.