Anthony+WITS+revision

Science is all around us in our lives. Science is reason you are able to read this in this electronic form right now. Science has allowed us to live much longer lives, in much easier ways. Everyone has this idea of when something is a science, or when something is scientific, however, do we really know what science is? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, science has four meanings: “1. the state of knowing **: ** knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding 2. a.** : ** a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study, b. something (as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge 3. knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method, **b ****.** such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena 4. a system or method reconciling practical ends with scientific laws” Is this all science is though? According this, science is knowledge, as that word is used seven times in the four definitions. What about experiments, observations, thought? Trying to define science is very difficult. To me science is the collective view of humanity about natural and physical phenomena. That though leads to another interesting question. Who does science? The easy answer is a scientist. But what makes someone a scientist? Does one have to be in a lab performing experiments, or do you have to just be someone with a creative idea seemingly out of nowhere that you prove to be not false. It is a twist on the classic riddle; what came first, the science, or the scientist? In my opinion, both are correct. There is no specific person in some specific place that does science; we all do science everyday when we count money, or grade papers to come up with a class average. So how has science changed over the centuries? That is way too broad of a question to only have one answer. The problem is, there are so many phenomena that we break science into different categories, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Of all of them, physics is the most fundamental to the way the universe works, and how it has changed over the centuries is a reflection on how humans have changed over that same time. The study of the universe and thus physics is as old as the ancient Greeks. One Greek, more than anyone else, would the lay the ground work for how all science would be done for the hundreds of years after him: Aristotle. As far as physics goes, Aristotle made countless contributions for his time. Like Newton would centuries later, he had laws of motion. As stated in Michael Fowler’s “Aristotle”, Aristotle’s laws of motion were that heavier bodies would fall faster than lighter ones, and the speed that something fell through a medium was inversely related to the medium’s density. This led him to deduce that a vacuum could not exist, because since it had no density, an object would have an infinite speed through it. He broke motion in natural and violent motion, natural required no force and moved only in straight lines, and violent requiring force, moving in any pattern. He stated that all matter was composed of four elements, fire, air, water, and earth. And finally, he speculated the heavens (universe) were composed of a fifth element, and aither, whose natural motion was circular, and dragged along with it all the heavenly bodies we see in the sky, with the Earth at the center of course. Studying the works of Aristotle is important because it gives an idea of the prevailing physical ideas of the universe for the next few centuries. The Church grasped these ideas because they allowed a lot of room for God to be in science. However, if we would compare the evolution of physics to a human life span, Aristotle’s work was simply the conception of physics. Modern physics would not be born until the 16th and 17th centuries. It was during this time that some of the most powerful names in the history of science left their mark, Copernicus, Galileo, and of course, Newton. Continuing along the idea of comparing physics to a human life span, this would be its birth. The works of these men, and the countless others were so radical, that they were known as The Scientific Revolution. While it is debated when exactly it began, many say it started with Copernicus, who championed the ideas that the Earth was the center of the universe (as explained by Robert A. Hatch in “The Scientific Revolution”). Galileo then took these ideas and expanded on them. He did a lot of work on surface tension, motion of bodies, and the motion of the Earth through the explanation of tides (as taken from Michael Fowler’s “Life of Galileo”). Johannes Kepler in this time came up with physical laws that governed the motion of planets. At the end of this revolution, there came probably the most famous scientist to ever live, Sir Isaac Newton. Among all the other great things, his greatest contributions to science were his invention of the calculus, and the development of the original theory of gravity. These men took science from supernatural involving God to explain everything, to making the universe mechanical, with equations to govern it. Again this is where physics stood for another 150 years. After this period though physics would become mature. Then in five years, physics changed again as science became more secular. First, was Planck’s discovery of the quantum at the turn of the 20th century, and second was Einstein’s 1905 paper on the Theory of Special Relativity. These two moments lead to a vast rethinking of physics. As Peter Galison said in his book //Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time// “Newton to Einstein: it is easy to represent this transformation of physics as a confrontation of theories floating above the world of machines, inventions, and patents.” These breakthroughs lead to the study of quantum mechanics, and took the universe from being mechanical and absolute, to being weird and probable, with no definite truth of anything. So where does physics stand now. Is it fully grown and near the end of teaching us everything it can? Is it in its middle ages and we are only have understanding. Or maybe this is just its birth. Only time will tell. This is the draw we have to science. We as a species want to know why things happen, and how we can control them. So we will continue to seek the answers, even if we never find them all.