15.1: What is Science?

Science creates machinery of destruction. It spawns mutants. It spews radiation. It murders in order to dissect. Its apparently objective pose is a cover for callous indifference. Its consequence will be the annihilation of us all.

Oops. Wait a minute, a message just arrived, and I need to make an announcement: "Dr. Frankenstein, please call your office."

OK, where was I? Oh, yes, well, science has its critics. It is often misinterpreted and often confused with some of its worst consequences, as in the joke above. But let's ask again, more seriously, what is science? Science is the opposite of magic. The word "science" is the Latin term for knowledge, but science isn't all of knowledge. Scientists don't have a "lock" on knowledge, but they do have our civilization's more reliable methods of gaining knowledge.

In this chapter, the word "science" will usually mean empirical science, the kind of science that makes observations and runs experiments in order to make predictions, create explanations and produce theoretical understanding of the physical world. Empirical science is not mathematics or formal logic because these fields do not use empirical methods. Physics, chemistry, and biology are the three main empirical sciences.

At any particular time in history, science has a body of knowledge, but actually science is more a way of getting that knowledge than it is the body of knowledge itself. In addition to the knowledge, science has agreed upon methods and agreed upon ways to solve certain kinds of problems. For example, in biological science, biologists agree that if you want to know what causes people to get pancreatic cancer you won't solve this problem by investigating the persons' favorite color or the times that the planet Venus is visible at night. There are better methods for investigating pancreatic cancer.

Doctors and engineers are not scientists. Creating science is not what doctors and engineers do. These people apply science, but usually they do not do science in the sense of create science. Consider engineering. Unlike scientists, the engineers primarily want to improve existing things that have been made by humans, for example, tractors, computers, and X-ray machines, or they want to improve human beings’ abilities to move faster and to communicate more easily with people who are far away.

Scientists very often make use of advances in engineering, but they have different primary concerns. Pure science is concerned primarily with understanding, explaining, and predicting. Engineering isn't. Engineering is focused on creating technology and controlling it, on getting machines to function as we want them to in a particular situation. That is how scientists are different from engineers. Doctors are more like the engineers than like the scientists.

As science grows it becomes more sophisticated and theoretical and precise. This makes it difficult for the untrained person to understand science. For example, it is shocking to people when they first hear from the scientist that a brick is mostly empty space. You can look for yourself and see whether the brick is mostly empty space, and you'll see it is solid; there's no empty space. So, who are you going to believe, the scientist or your own eyes? It took science many centuries before they accepted the claim that bricks and all other matter are made of atoms, each of which is mostly empty space except for a few tiny protons, neutrons and electrons that cannot be seen with your eyes alone. It took the arguments of Albert Einstein to convince the other scientists at the beginning of the 20 th century. Now, all schools tell students that matter is made of atoms. Before then, scientists did not agree on whether atoms existed. Einstein's and his colleagues' arguments in favor of atoms were very technical and depended upon sophisticated experiments plus their success at explaining phenomena with atoms that couldn't be explained well otherwise.

Albert Einstein at work in the Swiss Patent Office

Although the scientist's vocabulary is often so technical that the rest of us cannot read a scientific research paper, science is not as distant from common sense as many people imagine. Scientists, like the rest of us, look around at the world, try to explain what they observe, and are careful to back up what they say. Science is a slowed-down and more open and accountable image of what we normally do in coming to know about the world around us. Nevertheless, science isn't just common sense. Science is more cautious about what it claims to know, and it often overthrows traditional common sense in favor of new beliefs that can better stand up to testing.

Everybody agrees that science is important, even Edward Rothstein whose sarcastic remarks inspired the first paragraph of this section about science spawning mutants and spewing radiation. But some people think science is much more important and valuable than others do. According to the distinguished historian of science Herbert Butterfield, the rise of European science in the 17th and 18th centuries

...outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes.... It changed the character of men's habitual mental operations even in the conduct of the nonmaterial sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself.

The scientific revolution Butterfield is talking about was noteworthy for promoting the notion that scientific knowledge should be produced by the process that we now call the scientific method. This new method was very different from the medieval method of attempting to acquire knowledge from careful reading of ancient texts. At its heart, the scientific method is the method of testing hypotheses. A hypothesis is a claim that has been made. The idea is that the true hypotheses will stand up to repeated testing while the false hypotheses eventually will get refuted. Science and the scientific method are the main things that Western culture has contributed to the culture of the rest of the world.

In addition to biology, chemistry, and physics, another great science is stamp collecting. Here is why. Stamp collectors are careful; they use tools; they explain; they predict; and they make generalizations. These are marks of good science.

Stamp collectors are careful, like scientists. They measure and use tools such as rulers and magnifying glasses. They can explain why stamps have perforations and why they aren’t cubical and why they aren't bigger than a basketball. They can predict that most people's stamp collections will have more three-cent stamps than two-hundred-and-seventy-four cent stamps. They make generalizations, such as “There are more European stamps than Egyptian stamps.” So that's why stamp collecting is a science.

Hopefully that argument for stamp collecting was not convincing to you. Don’t believe everything you read. Stamp collecting is definitely not a science. It’s a hobby. All that reasoning I just performed was like this kind of reasoning:

A woman has two legs, one nose, and breathes air.
Mr. Dowden has two legs, one nose, and breathes air.
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Mr. Dowden is a woman.

More is involved in being a woman, right? Similarly, more is involved in being a science. The difficulty is in being more specific about just what else is involved. Here is an attempt to specify what else.

Many philosophers of science would say that in addition to being precise, careful, using tools, explaining phenomena, predicting observations, and making generalizations, science also (1) requires using the scientific method to justify its claims. More on this later. (2) Science assumes a background of no miracles and no supernatural causes. It is unscientific to say there was a hurricane in the Philippine Islands because God was angry with the people there. (3) Science continually makes inferences for new predictions in order to test general theories about how the world works. It is not stagnant like astrology and alchemy and stamp collecting. (4) Science has theories that are held tentatively and are falsifiable. That means science is opposed to dogma, and it requires science’s claims to be true or false depending on what the evidence is. If you have a theory that couldn’t be shown to be incorrect no matter what happens, then you aren’t doing science. Freud's theory of psychoanalysis has that defect.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Given the discussion above, the profession of a biologist is most like that of a

a. butterfly collector
b. nuclear engineer
c. astronomer
d. heart surgeon
e. inventor of new lighting systems

Answer

Answer (c).