An essay on Science

Let us start with asking, “What is science?”  Science is a method for regulating the gathering of knowledge.  It has a Method, and it has a rule.  The method is very simple.

• You decide to learn about something, so obviously you have an interest in it.
• You observe all you can.
• You form a hypothesis (a theory, or educated guess) about the truth of what you are observing.
• You devise a way to prove your hypothesis, and you perform the test.
• At this point one of two things will happen

• If the test does not verify your hypothesis, you go back a few steps and try again
• If the test verifies your hypothesis, then you publish it and become famous (at least in your close, scientific field).

This is the point where the rule come in.  The rule is that scientific knowledge is only accepted as fact when other scientists can review your work, perform your test, AND get the same outcome, repeatably.  If your results cannot be duplicated, your hypothesis is not considered to be knowledge - it is only a theory and while you still get credit for it, it is not considered to be scientific fact.  This failure to become fact might be because you failed to publish your theory and test results, or it might be because nobody else gets the same results.  There are a few special cases I’ll discuss later.

What is not obvious until you think about it for a while is that science does not give us a method to discover facts.  Instead, what it gives us is a method to evaluate discovery methods (which lead to the discovery of facts).  Scientific Method is what helps us distinguish facts from theories, which lets us know what is really knowledge and what is somebody’s unproven idea. 

Another non-obvious thing about science is that it forces us to share information, thus improving all of mankind in a uniform way.  The fact that the scientific method requires us to publish our results before our theories can become scientific fact means that scientists everywhere have to know what other scientists are thinking.  Governments and military leaders are sometimes bothered by this openness when ideas of a dreadful nature are published.  For example, in 1932 Sir John Cockroft and Ernest Walton formed a nuclear reaction by splitting atoms.  Other scientists built on their work and others built on it further until atomic bombs were developed in 1945, only 13 years later.  The United States did not want other countries to get atomic weapons because they did not want to be threatened by them (and who can blame us?), but scientists the World over already had all the information needed, except for details on how we actually constructed the bombs.  The knowledge was already available to scientists everywhere.  Many people fervently wish knowledge had not been shared in that instance, but scientific method demands it.  The positive results of this sharing outweigh the negative many times over.

On the other side of the scientific sharing of information coin is the internet.  The internet was developed by scientists and educators specifically to improve the ability to share scientific information of all kinds.  The first efforts were slow, but productive.  As computers became more capable, the internet also became more capable until suddenly it exploded out into the world at large and now it is readily available to everybody in almost all parts of the World.  With it came all kinds of junk, but scientific knowledge has never before been so available to so many people.  We have proved over and over that scientific concepts such as open sharing of information gives us tremendous capabilities to increase our knowledge of the World around us, so the internet will surely be ranked as one the most important developments in science ever.

Special Cases:  There are a few cases where a hypothesis remains a theory because it can’t be tested.  The most famous example of this is evolution, the theory about how there came to be so many species of animals on Earth.  We have never witnessed and documented the origin of a new species, and there are very good reasons why we do not want to invent new species, even if we could.  From what we observe in nature and the fossil record, new species arise at random times, and as frequently as a few times per thousand years, so keep your eyes peeled.