Greg+Silva+-+What+is+Science+-+Final+Version

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 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 education 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.

Is science the quest for absolute and complete truth? Apparently not, as science has revealed in numerous fields. Truth is indeed in the eye of the beholder (or observer) as demonstrated in such scientific areas as physics and neuroscience. Science can’t claim to search for absolutes either because, for all that we know, our idea of truth and reality could change every time we make a new discovery or breakthrough. Science can only try to explain the world as we perceive it, not as how we think it should arbitrarily and absolutely work. Plus, if science ever did realize a complete truth, scientists would be out of a job very quickly!

So if the “scientific method” and the quest for absolute and total truth aren’t all there is to science, what //is// science?

Science is the process through which civilization, by observing phenomena, can draw conclusions about those phenomena. 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:

1. **Any observation made must be assumed to be true**. For example, when Aristotle observed that a stone falls faster than a feather when dropped, his observation was true. His observation that the stone weighed much more than the feather was also 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. This is an excellent example of correlation without causation – just because two coincident facts seem to follow a pattern does not mean that one necessarily directly causes the other. One of science’s purposes is to find those correlations that are meaningful (and capable of explaining more phenomena) and not simply coincidence. To summarize, we have to assume our senses and instruments are as accurate as we expect them to be and are not deceiving us, and can’t assume that correlations are automatically cause-and-effect relationships.

Along this line of logic, there is no “absolute truth” in science. One simple, but effective, example of this is relativity, which allows modern scientists to predict how being in a certain gravitational field or inertial reference frame affects observations in different gravitational fields and reference frames. Relativity creates complete and total paradoxes if viewed from an absolute, arbitrary perspective. However, as the theory states, absolute truth is not the nature of reality. At best, we can only describe reality as best as we can perceive it, and this, and not some quest for the absolute truth.

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 altering the amounts of each humor in the body in an effort to cause or cure disease. However, the claim that many foolish medieval scholars may have 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 these exceptionally dogmatic scholars took Galen’s word without any observations of their own) and because the conclusion can’t possibly be false – after all, Galen did support humor theory and he was a reputed leader in classical (3rd century) biology. This is another example of correlation without a cause-and-effect relationship, in a way, since the fact that the reason offered (that Galen was a great physician and believed in humor theory) does explain the matter at hand (that an imbalance in humors is the cause of all diseases).

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 not just basic true/false logic and quantified logic (i.e. mathematics), but also a system of what Thomas Kuhn calls “paradigms,” or fundamental beliefs of what exists and how these are structured. These paradigms may be limited by a civilization’s ability to observe phenomenon, but they are hugely influential in how a civilization perceives reality and critical to scientific development.

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?

There are two major factors that affect the way that we look at science now and the way that scientists in the past approached the matter. First is 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 empirical support. Better observations and measurements also allow us to invalidate erroneous conclusions based on weaker observation and measurements.

The second factor, less obvious but still quite visible, is the advancement of logic that enables civilizations to radically alter their perception of reality. For instance, even though the Copernican system existed well before Newton made the notion of universal gravitation commonplace, until scientists accepted the logic of a heliocentric universe and all that it implied as “real,” and not a modeling alternative to Aristotelian astronomy, the idea of gravity holding everything together, from objects falling on the Earth to the Earth going around the Sun, simply made no sense. Such advances in logic, or paradigms, allow science to advance in unforeseen and novel directions by redefining what reality is and allowing any new and previous observations and conclusions to be described in terms compatible with the new system.

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

· Ancient Greeks lacked an understanding of electricity (lighting was caused by Zeus, the mighty thunder god) which made an atomic model based on electrically charged particles utterly impossible to imagine, much less test. 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 very low 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.

· Possibly 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 crystalline spheres made of some fifth element, ether, capable of perfect and infinite circular motion.

As this example of ancient Greek science 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 or a concept of invisibly small creatures. Microscopes, which were required to observe some of these pathogens, weren’t invented until 1590. This made other theories, namely the humor theory suggested by Hippocrates, more believable by comparison.

· The concept of matter as minute atoms possessing both structural and intrinsic properties (not even considering electrical charge or subatomic particles) lacked empirical support until such alchemical practices as the sublimation of sulfur, evaporation and condensation of mercury, and dissolution of metals in strong mineral acids provided examples supporting atomic models and opposing the concept of absolute, homogenous mixture of the Aristotelian elements shaped by essential substance.

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 and existing paradigms inadequate, so was the science that followed.