What is science?

[LesJarvis]

@Rimbo

In theory, you are correct. In practice, people do make an ideology out of it. Scientists do argument from authority and ignore the evidence just as often as Christians fail to love their neighbors and enemies.

Well, this is why I tried to make it explicit that I was talking about science as a philosophy, and also added the caveat that people who engage in the scientific method often conflate science with their own ideology. I think it’s a very important distinction to make and understand, however.

On a slightly tangential note, this is why I generally don’t describe myself as an atheist. Though the definition of atheism is fuzzy, I don’t want to present myself as having a positive belief that there is not a god. I prefer say I am a hard agnostic, or occasionally a Bertrand Russell agnostic, though since most people haven’t the faintest idea who he is it depends on the audience. I think he put it best, though:

@Bertrand Russell

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

Feel free to replace the Homeric gods with Flying Spaghetti Monsters, giant blue smerfs controlling your fate, or what have you. I myself do not believe in god, but I think to have a positive view that there is not a god is just as bad as having a positive view that there is a god since gods, practically by definition, are not disprovable entities, since you can always just say “god doesn’t want us to know he/she/it exists.”

[Midnight_Son]

Science is reality.

[Rimbo]

Yes, and that’s a great discussion to have in the right environment, which a 'net BBS is not.

[Rimbo]

@Midnight_Son

Science is reality.

Until recently, Science believed that the Coelacanth was extinct, when it was not. Therefore Science is merely our perception of reality.

[Midnight_Son]

@Rimbo

Until recently, Science believed that the Coelacanth was extinct, when it was not. Therefore Science is merely our perception of reality.

Science continously self-corrects. That is unsettling to some people, particularly religious people who want certainty. I think that’s what makes science great, because you come closer to the “truth,” whatever it may be.

[Mr_PeaCH]

@Funkula

Scientific method - Wikipedia

That the first reply (and second) to the question would turn to Wikipedia for the answer suggests the truth of what no less a scholar than S. Colbert has long said… “Science has a well-known liberal bias”.

[DeepT]

@Rimbo

Generally, the only things that are absolutely true are those which exist within closed, deductive systems, and even then, that is only if (a) the assumptions are true and (b) the deductive reasoning is logically (mathematically) valid.

For example: “If A, then B.” If A is true, then B must be true, and there are no exceptions.

Actually, you have described math, not science, and in particular, [i]discreet math[/i].

The flaw in scientific knowledge is that we’re limited to what we can observe.

Careful here, we are talking about Science, not scientific knowledge. there is a big difference.

So it’s important to know that scientific consensus is essentially meaningless; in Science, the facts are not decided by a democratic vote.

Not really. It is an excuse to NOT reinvent the wheel each time you want to make a car. Scientific consensus does not guarantee anything, but is generally a very safe bet. It does make it harder for the “crack pot” scientist to prove that he is in-fact, not a crack pot after all. It is a double-edged sword. In 99% of the cases it filters out all the static so you can operate on your current line of research. On the other hand, in the 1% of the cases where the consensus is wrong, it makes it very hard for a correct idea to be taken seriously.

– Edit: Provided link to discrete math.

[Enidigm]

@Rimbo

Because as components within the universe we seek to understand, we cannot observe it from afar, without affecting it or in any truly objective manner.

Nice answer, but wrong question. My speculation was about why the universe is hard to understand and it’s laws seem difficult to discover, not why we need science when we have plenty of caves lying around unoccupied.

[BobJustBob]

@DeepT

Actually, you have described math, not science, and in particular, discreet math.

Discrete math. Discreet math is when you do math but no one knows about it because you’re sneaky.

[DeepT]

Is it all that hard to understand? Is it just our current perspective makes it seem hard to understand when it is not?

Look at Newtons first law:
An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

That seems pretty basic and not ‘hard to understand’. You might be thinking that is a totally obvious statement. Yet… When was newton born? How many THOUSANDS of years did it take to get this law?

If it really was so simple, why didn’t Aristotle or Euclid put that rule down? There are dozens of laws like this, Laws that seem like “common sense” today. Yet back that, these were earth-shattering concepts. Only the most brilliant minds of the human race could come up with these concepts.

There is a more recent example of this, and I wish I could find the quote to go with this story.

When Einstein published is theory of general relativity, one of the other great minds in science was asked by a reporter, “What does it feel like to be only one of two people in the entire world to understand Einstein’s theory?” The guy thought for a second and said, “Nobody I know understands this aside from Einstein. Who is the third?”

Now this was after the theory had been published for a while and people had time to think about it. So after weeks or months of mulling over the theory, only 3 people in the entire planet “got it”. This is some hard science, right?

Fast forward to today. There are probably 10s of thousands people who “really get it” when it comes to the understanding of General Relativity. so what happened? Why were some extremely smart people in the early 20th century not able to get when physics grad students of today are able to grasp it with such ease?

I do not know why, however I would be confident in saying that the ideas were not nearly as complicated they first appeared to be. I would suspect, that scientific principals you find hard to grasp today may be viewed as trivial to understand by future generations.

If I were to guess, I would guess that the younger your are, the more malleable your mind is and the older you are, the more rigid it becomes. Metaphorically speaking, the ability to understand an idea requires your mind to adapt to it’s shape or form. Such that today, a young mind can easily adapt to the shape of the “General Relativity” concept, where as back then, the older ‘thinkers’ already their minds stuck in a more rigid state and it could not adapt to the shape of the mental concept of General Relativity.

So today, the yoingins who are learning about string theory will have an advantage over people who already have developed rigidity in their thinking. To them, it will not be hard to grasp, while the older generations may have a much more difficult time understanding it.

What I am trying to say is that the Laws that govern our universe may not be overly complex. It may just be our mental outlook that make them seem far more complex then they really are.

[baruk]

@Rimbo

The problem with the Scientific Method is not that scientific truth is fallible. The problem is that people don’t act scientifically, any more than they behave according to strict logic. When standard scientific practice believes one thing and the evidence demonstrates another, the scientific community – whose careers have been based on the old beliefs – generally react with scorn. The story of Barry Marshall is the archetype for this sort of thing.

It’s a great story, shame it’s rather a myth. One of the references in that article is the following: http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-11/bacteria.html
Skepticism is the natural position of science. Only after the H. pylori hypothesis had enough evidence to back it up was it commonly accepted by the scientific community. Further evidence and trials are required before a scientific idea changes medical doctrine ie. treating ulcers with antibotics rather than acid-suppressors.

The epilogue from “Bacteria, Ulcers, and Ostracism?” adds a twist to the story:

"An interesting article appeared in New Scientist a couple of years ago. It turns out that H. pylori lives in “around half the world’s population” and “in parts of the developing world as many as 90 percent of the population carries the bug,” but “only a fraction of these people ever get sick” (Hamilton 2001). Thus it may be a commensal after all. Of more concern is that it may protect against esophageal cancer, a disease that is recently on the rise even as rates of H. pylori carriage are falling. The question of whether it is wise to eradicate H. pylori thus remains open. Such is the nature of science: to march on. To Marshall’s credit, I found the article linked from his own H. pylori laboratory Web site (Helicobacter pylori Research Laboratory 2004).

Commensal is another word for symbiotic ie. H. pylori may be “friendly bacteria” for many people. If it has positive effects, prescribing antibiotics for ulcer sufferers may not always be appropriate.

[Rimbo]

@Midnight_Son

Science continously self-corrects. That is unsettling to some people, particularly religious people who want certainty. I think that’s what makes science great, because you come closer to the “truth,” whatever it may be.

Ahh, but that is a misconception about religion as well: Religious beliefs continuously change (although it’s difficult to say they self-correct).

@DeepT

Actually, you have described math, not science, and in particular, discreet math.

I know. That was my point: Scientific facts, unlike Mathematics, can be questioned, and have a degree of uncertainty. The Method is a means of limiting that uncertainty, a way of demonstrating that uncertainty is not a license to produce any old answer to a scientific question.

@TheSelfishGene

Nice answer, but wrong question. My speculation was about why the universe is hard to understand and it’s laws seem difficult to discover, not why we need science when we have plenty of caves lying around unoccupied.

My answer describes precisely and clearly why the universe is hard to understand and why its laws seem difficult to discover. There was no value judgment in my statement, except that which you yourself projected onto it.

Consider, as a weak analogy, understanding running software. A software debugger has to alter the way the system behaves to create its observations. The mere act of observing from a debugger alters the behavior, whereas a JTAG or oscilloscope can view the actual bits as they fly by without modifying the system’s behavior. It doesn’t make the software debugger useless, however; it just makes it trickier to use.

In the same way, if we somehow existed outside of the universe – and by “outside” I do not mean “in caves” but in some way that is, to steal a Douglas Adams line, “at right angles to reality” – then it would be easier for us to understand it. The simple fact of being part of it means we interact with it, and thus muck up the very things we’re trying to observe by the act of observing them.

The idea of observing the universe from outside of it – from a dimension orthogonal to the spacetime that makes up the universe – seems to me to be a not terribly difficult one to understand.

[Rimbo]

It’s a great story, shame it’s rather a myth.

Is it really a myth, or is it now being tabbed a myth by those who were so outspoken against the ideas in an effort to save face? “Oh, well, I didn’t really mean to say that it was --”

“‘Stupid, irresponsible, and that Drs. Marshall and Warren should be barred from any future conferences so that their stupidity does not infect impressionable minds who do not yet completely understand the truth.’”

“-- hmm, is that really what I said? Oh, all I really meant to say was just that we needed to see proper evidence in a peer-reviewed journal, and that if he’d just followed standard scientific procedure, then all would have been fine…”

[JeffL]

The other aspect of good scientific method, that seems trivial but is a good way to separate good science and scientists from those who have an agenda: good scientists and good scientific method requires you to run the experiments to try to DISPROVE your hypothesis. You can see the agendas come through when people spend their time running the experiments and and trying to find only those things that agree with their hypotheses.

The best scientist I ever worked with for any extended period of time was superb at taking a hypothesis and quickly seeing the experiments that would clearly disprove it, then running those experiments immediately. He saved a lot of people a lot of time and effort (as well as getting to the truth quicker than 99% of his colleagues.)

[Michael_Fitch]

Greetings:
Science is a genre of narrative. It has its conventions, like any genre, but it is ultimately a story we tell ourselves.

Best,
Michael.

[Midnight_Son]

All you science naysayers need to send my your PC’s, Tv’s, Cameras, video consoles, automobiles and other like items. You can’t have it both ways.

[Rimbo]

@Midnight_Son

All you science naysayers need to send my your PC’s, Tv’s, Cameras, video consoles, automobiles and other like items. You can’t have it both ways.

The best science naysayers are the best scientists.

[Rimbo]

@jeff lackey

The best scientist I ever worked with for any extended period of time was superb at taking a hypothesis and quickly seeing the experiments that would clearly disprove it, then running those experiments immediately. He saved a lot of people a lot of time and effort (as well as getting to the truth quicker than 99% of his colleagues.)

Exactly! And there are far too few true scientists of this nature, because it goes against human nature to question one’s own hypotheses.

[Midnight_Son]

@Rimbo

Exactly! And there are far too few true scientists of this nature, because it goes against human nature to question one’s own hypotheses.

I really don’t know what you’re arguing. You don’t believe in science? You think it’s bunk? What?

[Midnight_Son]

@Rimbo

The best science naysayers are the best scientists.

And this has to do with detecting pseudoscience! Quackery! Perpetual motion machines! Crop circles! Faith Healing!