What is science — for me.
Science is the human intellectual reaction to Nature’s actions (physical phenomena), so that Nature’s reaction to human actions (experiments or observations) are known or can be predicted.
You can propose your own definition in the previous post.
December 15, 2007 at 10:03 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
December 16, 2007 at 8:05 am
Idetrorce,
Of course you don’t have to agree with me. It’s quite probable that I’ll change my mind on what I wrote here eventually. In any case, you did not mention what specifically you don’t agree with.
Best,
Christine
May 2, 2008 at 12:51 am
What about emotion? And prejudice? I agree for the most part, but isn’t perspective the most important thing in science? Everything is relative. People are flawed; they’re biased. They define science; the sciences of the future, inventions, what could be. Predictions on what may have been are affected by the people predicting them, aren’t they? Maybe not the facts, but the rest of science. The possibilities. The current beliefs despite lack of hard evidence. (String Theory? The movement of the galaxies away from the center of the Universe? Replaced with theories on what the human mind can conceive of being the very beginning of everything.) I like to think human nature plays a big part in science. How humanity sees things.
May 2, 2008 at 9:33 am
Sure, you are right on pointing out that science is a human activity, and being so means that human (positive and negative) elements like ego, emotion, prejudice, envy, fanaticism, joy, available resources, external political situations, sociology issues, etc, enter in the whole body of research in different portions and at different times.
The idea here was to write (and invite others to write their own definitions) of what science is for them in a very concise way, and in a different, novel manner than the various well-known definitions and quotations that you may find elsewhere. Also, although I didn’t explicitly mentioned, the definition of science here was meant to reveal its most pristine form, that is, independent of human elements.
The point is: although science developed by mankind is inevitably dependent on those human elements, it should, in principle, be as much as possible independent of them, and in fact most dependent on the unique capacity and will for us humans to have curiosity about nature and its undelying workings, allied with a methodology that is self-regulating, and which provides as much as possible a logical guidance to find the right paths to nature’s substratum, in the form of mathematical laws and qualitative descriptions and understandings, etc (e.g., the scientific method).
So, yes, sure, our emotions come into play, but those that come a posteriori are the most innocuous and deserving (like the emotional feeling provided by “eureka!” moments); those emotions that intentionally come as means to arrive at a particular selfish objective, like being famous or things of that kind, destroy the pristine human endeavor of probing nature for the pure necessity of understanding (and possibly taking advange of that in order to survive and evolve).
Best,
Christine
March 27, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I really like you first definition of science in its purest form. In addition, I really like you qualification to the human element of science. So I’ll try to put forth my best answer.
A perfect scientist would leave all personal bias out and let the experimental results and data do all of the talking. This is why it is difficult to answer your question: what is science? In reality a more concise set of questions would be, what is science supposed to be? how has science manifested in human culture/society? The two answers are very different for me.
For the answer to the first I would use an answer similar to your original post, except in principle aliens would do the same science as humans so I might replace human with sentient/logical beings (to be as general as possible).
Answering the second question is a bit more difficult, because it is tied to history, society, government, culture, race, class, imperialism, war, weaponry, religion, technology, and many other things. Furthermore it is difficult to define science in a human sense, because it can be interpreted in so many different ways. “Science” means something different to a scientist than it does to an economist, historian, social worker, etc…
Finally, as a scientist, I would rather have to answer the first question than the second question, but as a human I think answering the second question is more relevant to understanding how we can use science to better the human condition.
Maybe I just dodged the question, but who knows.
BTW, I think that your blog is cool.
March 29, 2009 at 9:59 am
Oooh, one of my all-time favourite subjects!;)
Seriously tho, I am currently very intrigued with the idea of an embodied consciousness (see e.g. Lakoff). The problem with defining science is that our perceptions of reality are the product of our evolutionary history. This can be extended quite a long way, even to our conceptions of logic (I balk at using this to describe mathematics, but my balking may be a bias too). So it is at least possible that all of our discoveries are only an expression of one specific way of looking at the Universe. I realize that I am rapidly sliding into instrumentalism here, and want to stress that as a physicist and a scientific realist, I am not claiming that it IS the case, only a possibility. But what a deliciously disturbing possibility!
March 29, 2009 at 10:03 am
“The point is: although science developed by mankind is inevitably dependent on those human elements, it should, in principle, be as much as possible independent of them, and in fact most dependent on the unique capacity and will for us humans to have curiosity about nature and its undelying workings”
Absolutely lovely, and I could not agree more. But see my above reply: our conception of what is “independent” may be faulty. Ouch. It is late; I have had a few drinks and am being rather self-consciously radically sceptical. Forgive me.