Many people outside academia don't know exactly what science is — they may have an abstract mental image of a group of people happily examining worms or students with bubbling colored liquids in flasks, but they may not be able to precisely define what science is. Science is not about WHAT you do but about HOW you do things. A scientific view of the world is different from the casual observation of everyday life, but it is critical to advance our understanding of the universe, from outer space to a single-cell bacterium. So, what is science, how is scientific knowledge formed, and why do all of us need to use the scientific view from time to time?
What is science?
Understanding abstract concepts is always difficult, and describing science is no easier than describing, for example, the feeling of love. In general, science is a set of actions aimed at studying and systematizing data about the world around us. Linguistics, biology, physics, and many other branches of scientific knowledge fit this definition (science can even explore science itself!).
In a broader interpretation, we can define science as any activity aimed at obtaining and processing knowledge, in which knowledge is revered and sacred itself, even if it is not for practical application. Throughout human history, we have conducted science and created an immense network of knowledge. Scientists are all those who are involved in this network, conducting experiments, collecting samples, observing nature, and analyzing their findings. There are many written and unwritten rules surrounding scientists and science. Most of them are intended to make science universally understandable and improve the spread of knowledge — for example, the rules for writing a scientific article (read about it in our topic Scientific articles).
What is scientific knowledge?
Scientific knowledge, in general, is the totality of all the knowledge of mankind obtained as a result of scientific activity — observations, experiments, and so on. This complex web of information can be categorized into particular fields of science, also called disciplines — for example, the study of how cats purr (felinology) or the study of frog mating rituals (batrachology). Knowledge can be considered scientific if we understand exactly how it appeared and if we can repeat the observation under the same conditions.
Scientific knowledge might be empirical or observable and based on experience. "Cats purr" and "toads don't jump" are empirical knowledge. A scientific experiment also offers empirical knowledge: you can see in practice that cats purr exactly at a frequency of 20-40 GHz, and toads refuse to jump in all conditions. In addition, knowledge can be theoretical. Theoretical knowledge is created when scientists draw a series of conclusions based on logic and calculations from fundamental rules of the universe — for example, that mass cannot be created or destroyed, which can be used to prove that a chemist cannot create something out of nothing.
To capture scientific knowledge and present it to other scientists, scientists write scientific publications — articles, monographs, reviews: the results in them must be able to be verified by other scientists, and other scientists often use these results as the basis of their own research into new questions and areas of science.
The scientific view of the world
Science uses the scientific method to understand the world. This is a system of rules, or more precisely, a system of values and principles. The first "requirement" of the scientific method is that any statement must have proof. Popper's falsification principle says that it is necessary to check scientific theories not by searching for evidence but by searching for facts refuting it. A scientist cannot and should not take any knowledge for granted, that is the difference between science and faith (complete trust or confidence in someone or something without any evidence). It is possible to dress untrue statements up in the language of science, so it is important to make sure that even the most official sounding statements are true. From this, we can state the second principle, that any scientific statement should be verifiable. The third requirement is that new assumptions must be logical and based on the existing scheme of knowledge. Finally, scientists must be objective about ideas and information and be willing to correct or update their body of knowledge if new data does not confirm it. Theories can be refuted by subsequent research — this is normal and how science corrects itself. For example, it was once generally believed that the Earth is the center of the universe, but as our ability to observe outer space improved, we have moved away from this incorrect theory. Not everything that looks like a scientific statement is actually a scientific statement. Statements that claim to be scientific but at the same time have no evidence and are poorly studied are referred to as pseudoscience.
The two most important manifestations of science are hypothesis and theory. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation or assumption about something, while a theory is an attempt to bring several ideas together to explain a concept. If we take an example observation: "14 cats from group A purred when they were scratched," then we can make the hypothesis that "perhaps purring is associated with scratching" and state a theory: "purring is probably a form of approval of scratching, and it can be assumed that purring is a common property of all domestic cats in response to scratching".
Conclusion
Science is a set of actions aimed at studying and systematizing data about the world around us. Science uses the scientific method to collect and process this data. Four general principles that define the scientific method are: every statement must have proof, every statement should be verifiable by other scientists, any new assumptions must be logical and fit into the previous body of knowledge, and scientists must be willing to examine their own assumptions objectively and correct them based on new knowledge. We have examined the differences between hypothesis and theory and discussed how they are related to each other and with faith. Science requires a specific and intensive view of the world, but it offers a lot to those who dare.