Determining What Science Is
Science is a lot more than equations, chemicals, or lab assignments. In fact, the word science comes from the Latin word scientia, meaning simply knowledge. In its broadest sense, science is any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome. You can read more about this broad definition on Wikipedia.
Learn About Science with UC Berkeley's Science 101 Guide
A fantastic resource to learn about the fundamentals of science is the University of California at Berkeley's Science 101 web site.
Definition of Science
Here is the definition of "science" from that site:
Our knowledge of the natural world and the process through which that knowledge is built. The process of science relies on the testing of ideas with evidence gathered from the natural world. Science as a whole cannot be precisely defined but can be broadly described by the following set of key characteristics:
The Process of Science Flowchart
The Science 101 site features the following excellent interactive flowchart to illustrate the continual, iterative process of how ideas progress to become accepted, and challenged, scientific facts and theories:
Understanding Science
The Science 101 site describes what science is in great detail starting on this page. Here is the introduction to Understanding Science:
Famous Science Educators Speak about Science
The Beauty of Science by Alex Filippenko
Alex Filippenko is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley.
You can watch an entire series of astronomy lectures delivered by streaming video from him here: Introduction to General Astronomy
Here is a clip of him discussing the sheer beauty of science and of understanding how the universe works:
Differentiating Science from Pseudoscience
While it's important to understand how to recognize what science is, it's equally important to understand what is not science or what ideas or ways of explaining things are not scientific.
The Science 101 site also educates its audience about how to recognize pseudoscience or unscientific claims in the page entitled Science in Disguise
The Science 101 site shows use the Science Checklist shown above to show that Intelligent Design and Astrology are both unscientific.
The Pseudoscience of Astrology by Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was an American astronomer, astrochemist, author, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. He is most famous for his ground-breaking public television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, seen now by more than 500 million people. Cosmos told the history of astronomy in particular and science as a whole in a similar style to Jacob Bronowski's earlier The Ascent of Man.
"We today can recognize the antiquity of astrology in words such as disaster, which is Greek for ‘bad star,’ influenza, Italian for (astral) ‘influence’" — Carl Sagan, in Cosmos, describing how astrology is not a science, but instead a pseudoscience, despite its continued popularity in today's popular culture.
Here is the full clip of him discussing why astrology is not science, but why astronomy is:
Science Inspires Us to Be Better
The wonder that we as humans have brought to the natural world in which we live has inspired us to explore, invent, and achieve. It has inspired us to land and walk on the moon, and has enabled us to send spacecraft far, far outside of our own Earth's orbit. When Carl Sagan was working with the Voyager spacecraft team, he suggested that the craft turn back toward the Earth after it passed Saturn and take a photograph of the Earth in the distance. He later wrote a book entitled Pale Blue Dot.
The following famous video clip and narrative puts into perspective our fragile existence and underscores the importance of compassion in dealing with our planet and each other for our own survival.
To watch a more complete telling of the story about the Voyager craft and the photo, click here
Science Cautions Us Against Arrogance, Self-Delusion, and Dogma
As the Berkeley Science 101 site, Alex Filippenko, Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski (as you'll see momentarily) all point out in the video clips above, science is at its best when we use it to guard ourselves against thinking ourselves too smart. Science is at its best when we use it to continually learn new things and to upgrade our current best understanding about how and why things work the way they do. Science is at its best when it encourages our curiosity about the natural world, our place within it, and how we can do better things and be better people.
I (Josh, co-organizer of AST) wrote an essay about what Carl Sagan meant to me a few years ago entitled The Eternally Curious Carl Sagan.
I summarized the distinction between a dogmatic approach to truth and a truly scientific approach with these juxtaposed phrases:
The dogmatist knows all the answers. He or she accepts no criticism and opens no ears. Merely questioning the dogmatist amounts to overt and intolerable criticism ipso facto in his or her mind. The dogmatist listens to no questions and throws all criticism to the scrap heap.
The true scientist has more questions than answers. He or she explicitly seeks criticism and opens ears to others. Strong questions about the scientist's ideas afford opportunities to confirm or deny their validity. The scientist must accept questions and readily understands that he or she may be forced to throw cherished ideas to the scrap heap.
Science, at its core, is a humbling process that informs us primarily of this: the fact that we know very little with absolute certainly, and can, and must, always learn more to improve our understanding.
Science, Ultimately, Must be About Humanizing Each Other
Jacob Bronowski was a British mathematician and biologist of Polish-Jewish origin who produced a very famous science documentary about human evolution and history called The Ascent of Man.
In a famous, haunting, scene in The Ascent of Man, Bronowski visits Auschwitz and makes a plea to the audience about the importance of using science to guard ourselves against arrogance, self-delusion, and dogma.
Here is his quote in full:
"It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people."
And, here is a clip of him speaking these words:
Read much more about science as a human activity on the Science 101 web site's Science as a Human Endeavor section.
