What+is+Science?+1

What is science? That is the question. It seems like a dumb question to be asking seeing as there are countless scientific fields and countless more specific disciplines. The fact of the matter is, so much time and energy has been put into cracking secrets of the universe that the question of defining what it is that makes science science has fallen to the wayside. I personally believe that science is the process by which new knowledge is discovered. Not necessarily a coherent, logical process, but a process nonetheless. When I speak of science as a process, I am not talking about the scientific method. If all knowledge was discovered through such an ordered procedure nothing surprising would ever be discovered. Throughout history, the majority of all discoveries have been made by accident. People, some known as “scientists,” some not, would do things for the sole purpose of finding out what would happen. In fact, most experiments are done to see what the result will be, not to prove or disprove the researcher’s theory. It is in observation that the most useful data is collected. Science at its most basic level is just the discovery of truth by observation, experimentation, mathematics, and logic. It is the proving, or disproving, of what people know to be true by logical reasoning. This being said, science is not simply experimentation in stereotypical lab scenarios. It is the collecting and coalescing of truths, inferences, theories, and general knowledge in a coherent manner. The reason there are so many different types of sciences is because human beings constantly find the need to catalog and categorize things. Hence, out of the general term of “Science” came physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, astronomy, oceanography, psychology, computer science, mathematics, materials science, and Engineering, which, not always considered a science, requires a far amount of “scientific” knowledge. Science has become not only the way by which knowledge is discovered but also how it is categorized. Science is logic. It has been since its beginnings in the times when philosophers were the primary “Scientists.” They discovered knowledge solely through basic observations and reasoning. Nevertheless they were the source by which new things were discovered. Also, science is strongly connected to technology. Most of the time inventers of new technologies were also scientist. They took what knowledge had been compiled and adapted it to useable criteria. Be the adaptation of projectile motion study to the calculation of proper trajectory angles for catapults, or the use of radioactivity detection theories to use in the medical field. Engineers who work on planes need to know the physics of lift. Technology would not work without the science behind it so therefore technology is science. Although, this was not always the case for many inventions were made with no scientific knowledge whatsoever. In the most general sense technology is science but inventors are not always scientists. By my definition, science is a coherent collecting of knowledge. Inventors and innovators didn’t always do that. They weren’t connected to the scientific community they did things on their own by trial and error, not understanding the physics behind how their inventions worked. Institutions have always been connected to science. As with the need of scientists to categorize their knowledge, they also had a need to do their research in a controlled environment. Throughout history, places of learning were the most common institutions. The ancient Greeks had the academies of Plato and Aristotle. During the middle ages, scholars did research in churches and monasteries. As the world came out of the dark ages research moved to universities like Cambridge and Oxford. It stayed that way till current times. The reason for this is that colleges have the highest concentration of intelligent people. Science is the collection of knowledge. It is the categorization of new discoveries. It is the basis of technology and the purpose of institutions. Science in its most basic description is the most vague term to describe and categorize the laws of nature.