Greg+Silva+-+What+is+Science+-+A+First+Stab

When we think of the world today, it is hard to avoid the involvement of science. After all, we are surrounded in our everyday lives by technological wonders, including computers and the seemingly infinite reach of the Internet, appliances such as refrigerators that make our lives easier, and powerful measuring instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope, electron microscopes, accelerometers, and atomic clocks, just to name a few. It seems, with all of this technology made possible by science, that we can understand almost anything by applying scientific principles to it – how long it will take to get from here to there, which way to go, how much fuel we will use along the way, how that fuel turns into forward force, even how the subatomic particles in that fuel work.

But what //is// science?

Is it that “scientific method” that we have all learned in high school that is something like "Scientific knowledge comes from testing theories by logically deducing hypotheses from them, using experiment and careful observation to test the hypotheses, and revising theories that lead to incorrect predictions" (Halwes)?

While that may be a way to learn about the world and it may be considered scientific, it certainly isn’t the only way we learn things. Galileo certainly wasn’t thinking about proving Aristotle’s hypothesis about planetary motion wrong when he pointed his newly crafted 20x telescope towards Jupiter – after all, his history was in mathematics, not astronomy, and until he made these observations and others published in //Siderius Nuncius//, Galileo probably did anticipate or care one way or the other whether Copernicus or Aristotle made more sense – both used the same level of mathematical models to describe planetary motion; neither was easier than the other.

That example (which is merely one of very many) clearly shows that a “scientific method” is not needed to make crucial leaps and bounds in science.

So if the “scientific method” isn’t all there is to science, what //is// science?

Science is the process through which civilization, by observing phenomena, can draw logical conclusions about those phenomena based on its observation. These conclusions can then be used to infer other conclusions about related phenomena through logical reasoning.

As simple as that statement seems, there are several clarifying requirements that distinguish science from learning in other ways (namely theology):

1. **Any observation made must be assumed to be true**. For example, when Aristotle observed that, when he dropped a stone and a feather at about the same time, the stone fell much faster than the feather, his observation was true. His observation that the stone weighed much more than the feather must also have been true. However, his conclusion that, because the feather was lighter than the stone, it fell slower, was not necessarily true because that statement is not an //observation//, but a //conclusion// based on observation. To summarize, we have to assume our senses and instruments are as accurate as we expect them to be, and that people who make these observations aren’t knowingly lying to the rest of us.

2. **Any conclusions based on observation must be falsifiable**. As an example, Hippocrates claimed that the body was composed of four humors – blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, and that diseases resulted from an imbalance in these humors. This is a //completely scientific claim// based on the observation of blood, phlegm, and bile in the human body, even if the reasons behind the conclusion (that each humor represented one of the classical elements – air, fire, earth, and water respectively) were not intuitive, because this conclusion could be contradicted through tests involving disease and altering the amounts of each humor in the body in an effort to cause or cure disease. However, the claim that many medieval scholars made towards medicine, that disease must be caused by an imbalance in humors because the great physician Galen said so, is //not scientific// both because it may not be based in observation (if they took Galen’s word without any observations of their own) and because the logical statement can’t possibly be false – after all, Galen did support humor theory and he was a reputed leader in classical (3rd century) biology.

This clarification also eliminates the possibility of divine intervention as a scientific conclusion. The claim that disease is sent by God (gods, spirits, any other supernatural beings) to punish sinners can’t be proven false, even if somehow only sinners become ill, because God (gods, etc.), as an arbitrary creation of mankind, can do anything mankind can imagine He can. There is no way to argue that God (gods, etc.) didn’t cause the disease against an argument that claims that He did because God (gods, etc.) can do anything!

3. **A system of logic must exist**. This includes true/false logic and the understanding of mathematics needed to make use of observations and observed data.

4. **A uniform system of measurements must exist where applicable**. Anyone who, for instance, measures one cubit, must find it to be the same length as any other person’s cubit. Without appropriate units, it is impossible to understand anything beyond a very basic observational level.

So if that is all there is to science, what exactly makes science as Aristotle knew it different from science as we know it?

Assuming that all of the conditions required for science existed, the main difference between sciences in various points in history and through various cultures was the ability to observe and measure phenomena. Better observation and more precise measurement allow us to make conclusions that, without those observations and measurements, would lack support and also allow us to invalidate erroneous conclusions based on weaker observation and measurements.

The following are a few examples of how a lack of observational tools can impact science:

· Ancient Greeks lacked an understanding of electricity (caused by Zeus, the mighty thunder god) which made an atomic model based on charged particles utterly impossible to test. Further, the thought that all matter was made of four elements – air, earth, water, and fire – intuitively made more sense in the ancient world. After all, water put out fires, and many things tended to exhibit properties of at least some of these elements in proportion.

· Further, the Greeks had absolutely no concept of inertia or momentum. Not only did they lack a way to accurately measure speed (hard to do without clocks capable of measuring to a second or so), but they completely misunderstood the concept of resistance because their environment prevented the creation of surfaces with nearly no friction (a good example would be wet, smooth ice). This led the Greeks to believe that V = F/R, leading to several other bad conclusions – particularly that voids can’t exist and that nothing can move without some force acting on it. Until vacuum pumps that could create voids and low-friction surfaces were used to test motion, this concept remained valid.

· The most blatant result of the Greeks’ bad physics was their concept of astronomy. To the Greeks, the system that made the most sense was that the Earth was immovable at the center of the universe (because if it moved people would fly off of it and if it spun people would go west when they jumped), and that the Sun, Moon, and planets went around the Earth, using epicycles to account for retrograde motion. These bodies, therefore, must have been carried in some crystalline sphere and must be made of some fifth element, ether, capable of perfect and infinite circular motion.

As this example shows, one bad conclusion can lead to several bad statements, even if the statements are all made in a completely scientific manner.

· The concept of pathogenic diseases carried by very small life forms is impossible to support without microscopes, which weren’t invented until 1590. This made other theories, namely the humor theory suggested by Hippocrates, more believable by comparison.

As strange as it seems, coming from an educational background of more or less calling Aristotle’s views antithetical to science, we can understand that despite the fact that later scientific advancements found his views dead wrong, Aristotle and other ancient scientist-philosophers were generally scientific in their approach to determining how the world works. Only when people blindly defended these scientists on the basis of their word alone did their work go from scientific statements to unscientific dogma.

The next time you think about making fun of previous “scientific” theory (as fun as it may be to laugh at the notion that someone believed that people would fly off the earth if it moved), keep in mind that science, with a few restrictions, only needs to be conclusions based on observation. If the observations were weak, so was the science that followed.