Andrew-What+is+this+science?(The+first+swipe)

At quick inspection the question “What is science?” seems innocent enough. It's just people with college degrees and white lab coats, mixing chemicals and doing complicated things with fancy machines, right? Or is it? When one delves deeper into the actual idea and it's history this facade that the average person today blindly accepts begins to develop some cracks. Not to imply that “science” is some conspiracy to fool the common man or some elitist group but just that few ponder what exactly defines what we call science. And, when we do it becomes clear that the answer isn't so clear set.

Today, the average person with or who is completing a basic highschool education would probably respond to the question in a relatively predictable way. Their answer would include words and phrases such as “the scientific method,” observations, experiments, controls, and similar others. We're taught by textbooks that this is the basis of science and that science is done by scientists, which today is considered a profession. However when one looks closely at all the discoveries made and who's doing them, it's not always by someone in a lab with a fancy degree. These men and women are given the most credit and their words the most weight but there have been many cases where people with a highschool degree or less making important advances.

So, when you boil it down to the basics, science is a general pool of knowledge, to which anyone can contribute. What defines it is the unwritten rules that govern what is accepted, what is not, and to what degree. The burden of proof falls to the person that makes a claim, if they can prove it and explain it in ways that others can reproduce and that stands up to their criticism. Then it becomes accepted “science.” The scientific method, experiments, and all those complicated words one usually first thinks of may not be the definition of science but instead are what facilitates and streamlines it. They don't make it, they make it go faster and easier.

Using this definition, in my logic, seems to create a more lasting idea of science. It can be applied to the science of many eras and fit fairly comfortably. Looking back to past and starting with the Greeks, the great minds such as Aristotle could still by this idea be considered scientists. By today's standards with our newer methods and ideals, his weak experimentation and observation would make him little more than a dreamer in some views. Not to say that he ignored what he saw but in areas such as physics he may not have looked so closely. However at the time he developed his ideas, defended them, and had they accepted as truth. So while now we may view his ideas as blatantly and obviously wrong, at that time they must have seemed to others to work and were accepted. Therefore it was an intellectual advance and thus a science.

So in it's basic form anyone can do science and be a scientist. As it has progressed though, the requirements to continue may have changed it into what we think of it. Science is a process of expanding knowledge, expanding upon and refining what we already know. At a point technology starts to become a limiting factor. We needed microscopes and telescopes when the frontiers became respectively too miniscule and to vast. More precise measuring equipment is constantly required to refine our data. Reactors and particle colliders were developed to prod into recreate the instant that everything began. The time and cost of science has become restrictive to those who can do it. No longer is going out, capturing, and dissecting an animal able to lead to major discoveries like it would have been in Aristotle's time. This can possibly help describe why a scientist today is thought of as the person in the lab coat, the person who has dedicated their life to studying the world and collecting the necessary resources to do so.

Continuing with the idea of what created the idea of the modern scientist, the pursuit of knowledge has produced so much that the human life span has become extremely limiting. As said before, science builds on everything that came before it, so logically it becomes just too vast to easily handle. To continue to expand upon something you must know and understand what came before. At a point specialization becomes necessary since one mortal human no longer has the time or even the mental ability to absorb and comprehend everything that humanity has attained before them. So higher education in specific areas or majors became a natural requirement to be able to continue moving the intellectual pool forward. Thus scientists have become defined by their college degrees. No longer can a single individual work in subjects across the board such as Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, etc. The Renaissance Man has essentially been killed by the limited capability of man.

Science is fairly simple in what it is supposed to be but how it's defined by a generation changes with each one. It has become refined and institutionalized to deal with the current complexity of knowledge. And is accepted differently by the society in which it exists. It advances knowledge but for what purpose? In a religious society it might be desired to attempt to glorify god. A warring people may focus on weapons of war. A starved society on agriculture. A deprived culture on conserving resources and finding new ones. Geography and culture can logically define their focus on science, on what knowledge they're trying to collect. So science somewhat becomes a living entity. It is ever changing, growing, and varying depending on a multitude a factors. Therefore when it comes to answering the initial question, “What is this science?”, there may not be a true answer. It is the search for and expansion of knowledge but beyond that it gets almost impossibly difficult to define. The answer may be like an asymptotic function, always getting closer but never quite reaching the end.