What+is+science+-+First+Draft

In today’s world one cannot help but be influenced by this thing called science. Every person from every culture in every corner of our earth has this intangible presence called science. But what is science exactly? Well science is a noun, and although it isn’t a person, place, or thing, it does fall under that small category of idea. It is an ever evolving idea about two-thousand four hundred years in the making.

To the Greeks, science was mainly based upon philosophy. And since the question, “what is science?” would mainly be asked by a philosopher, it is only fitting to begin here; plus it’s chronological and convention tells me to do it this way. Aristotle pretty much kicked off this whole meeting of the minds thing back in Greece. Although scientific advancement was limited due to their mathematical limitations as well as technological ones (we’ll get there later), Aristotle invented this thing called logic. In a nut shell what he said was that if A equals B, and B equals C, then A must in turn equal C. This type of deductive reasoning had its pros and cons. On one hand it allowed them to conclude on various observations they made about the world around them. On the other hand it led them to outrageous conclusions that were completely radical and false. An interesting question comes up as we analyze this time period, why? Why the sudden interest in what makes things tick? Throughout history from this point onward, the social purpose of science generally dictates to what field of study gets the most focus. I believe Plato explains this epoch’s purpose for science beautifully. Plato emphasized that the arguments and problems they attempted to solve seemed at the time, “to be merely mental games, valuable for developing the mind.” Now it isn’t until the Renaissance Period that true thinkers gave a giant leap in scientific advancement, and brought us much closer to what we believe this science is today. The only obstacle that geniuses like Copernicus and Galileo faced was the ever present influence of the church. Now there is one main difference between Theology and science. First of all theology is based on faith and trust, and as I will explain later, science depends on fact and as little trust as possible. The reason these two forces clashed at this time was because both aimed toward the same goal; a higher understanding of the world around us and what it all means to us. Advancements in mathematics and technology enabled new, more acute observations of the universe possible. But with some of this newly obtained knowledge, came great controversy. Nicolas Copernicus was a holy man, and a scientist, so when he observed that the earth may not be the center of the universe, like bible told him; he was torn between what he believed and what he saw as reality. Eventually, meaning the year that he died, Copernicus’ theory was published in 1543, and it planted the seed of doubt in many peoples’ minds about the credibility of the church. They saw that scientific fact, even the little that Copernicus had to make these radical statements, was reality, and what the Church had to offer was only assumptions they were told were the truth. This was in my mind the beginning of a scientific approach to solving the everyday curiosities we have. Now since the days of Aristotle up until the present date science has been ever-evolving. How so? Well, with advancements in technology scientists from every century have been able to trust less, assume less and therefore come to more accurate conclusions. This, therefore, made it easier for the scientific community and the general public to accept this finding as the truth. So why does data make people believe something is the truth, and printings like the bible don’t. Is God’s word not good enough? Science is the process of producing unbiased unflinching proof about phenomena in nature. So if you make an observation that goes against the word of God what does it mean?. However, even today there is some form of trust involved in reaching scientific conclusions. For example, if I observe that when I rub my socks against a carpet and then touch something medal, I get shocked. A conclusion I can make on this observation would be to say I excited electrons and produced static shock, and since medal conducts electricity it shocked me when I touched it. I can’t see excited electrons, but the scientific community says they’re there. Theories and Laws both involve some sort of trust, Scientific Law is just a theory widely excepted by the scientific community. Men like Democritus and Newton had trouble making the community believe there theories for lack of proof, unavailable to them because of technological limitations. Technology is directly proportional to advancement in science. With unsophisticated instruments like the Greeks had, hardcore evidence to what they assumed to be true was nearly impossible, thus logic was applied to help clarify where conclusions came from. The knowledge about the universe we’ve gathered today, however, would not have been possible to obtain without some of the intricate pieces of equipment used. Up until the early 1900’s our universe was just the Milky Way Galaxy, but with the rise of the Big Bang Theory and the invention of the Hubble space telescope, what we learned was that we are just a speck of sand compared to the rest of the universe. One last interesting point about scientific observation is that it is based on perception of the world. And in connection to perception, one must realize that our senses tell us everything we know about our lives. Thus reality is just what our synapses want to transmit to our brains. One of the greatest films ever concocted to elaborate on this point was __The Matrix__. Neo believed he was in reality based on what his senses told him, little did he know that it was all fake, a program. What is this science thing we live amongst every day of our lives? Well there is no complete way to dictate it but pretty much it is just a method of explanation used by humans. We observe, do a little bit of calculations on a mathematical system we created and in no way is tangible, and we conclude base on the results we get. Science makes things easier to understand. It makes us warm inside because we know how fast light travels and how far we can launch a projectile at our enemy and destroy them. So I guess if we use Aristotelian logic on this one we could say that since science makes us warm, and hot cocoa makes us warm, it is inevitable that science is hot cocoa.