Science

I have always considered myself to be a scientist. When I was a child I was always fascinated by technology and things that seemed "scientific". I grew up in the 1960s and I vividly recall the excitement around the Apollo Moon Missions and the general interest in and acceptance of new technologies and science in general. There were transistor radios, color televisions, calculators and so on.

So there was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted to pursue science in university and for some reason I was particularly attracted by chemistry. When I did attend university I indeed majored in chemistry and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree (actually the degree is called a "Four Year" degree, which was considered to be an Honors equivalent, the University of Winnipeg did not have an Honors degree program in Chemistry at that time).

I recall that all during my university years, and even during my working life, I have spent a lot of time reflecting upon "what is science?" or "what exactly is a scientist?". Even though I describe myself as a scientist, what is it about what I do that makes it scientific?

The activity that western society typically refers to as Science began with the Greeks and in their time would have been considered "Natural Philosophy" a description that it was known by until the Scientific Revolution of the 1600's and 1700's. The key distinction between the two modes of thought was that Natural Philosophy was based on Rationalism, the idea that progress was made by thinking through established knowledge and then recombining this knowledge in new ways, and the Scientific Revolution introduced the experimental method as the basis for progress in Science. The word "science" originates from the latin word "scientia" which means "knowledge". It came into general use during the period of the scientific revolution but its exact origin is not known.

This evolution of thought would seem straight-forward but an exact definition of what is scientific has been very dynamic ever since the Scientific Revolution. There have been many schools of thought, none of which seems to be able to capture the concept completely. For example, the experimental method is certainly important and it is desirable to have hypotheses and theories tested experimentally, but this is not always possible and yet this creative aspect of science is an important one. A modern example would be the work on String Theory.

There does appear to be two distinct aspects to Science -- the creative theory and hypothesis forming aspect and the testing and corroborative experimental aspect. This dichotomy in the overall process has spun-off many categories in science. For example there are distinctions such as hard science, soft science, bogus science and categories such as physical science, medical science, forensic science, and so on.

The distinction between what is a hard science and what is a soft science comes down to whether, as in hard sciences, you can obtain testable repeatable data from experimentation. Soft sciences tend to rely on observation and anecdotal evidence. Both types of evidence can then be subjected to further statistical testing and mathematical modeling. There is no generally agreed upon model for science. Most people, whether they realize it or not, think of science as the application of the scientific method. That is, the formation of hypotheses followed by the testing of hypotheses by experiment. Of course there are many ways to design an experiment so the question immediately arises as to the validity of the experiment. Karl Popper devised a criteria known as "falsifiability". According to Popper it may never be possible to show whether a theory or a hypothesis can be proven, but it should be possible to show that it is false if it is indeed false. This is the distinction that is made between certain scientific approaches, such as astronomy, and bogus sciences, such as astrology. The idea is that astrology is not a science because it does not produce results which can be falsified.

Falsification is indeed an important component of scientific thought but it is one of those instances where an idea is necessary, but not sufficient. If science was solely based on this principle it would not allow for how creativity and induction occur in science. In fact, if you look at Popper's idea in a strictly logical way you can see that it is just a variant of the rules for logical deduction. The basic rule of logical inference is called Modus Ponens and it is a syllogism that takes on this form:

A implies B

A

Therefore B

If you know that A implies B then there is also a true relationship between A and B called the "contrapositive", that is:

A implies B

also means that:

not B implies not A

So what Popper is really pointing out is that science, at the very least, must be logical. He is willing to allow that you may never be able to prove A. Therefore the original syllogism of Modus Ponens is incomplete because you can not state "A". However, he is stating that if the theory or hypothesis has any chance of being valid at all, then the contrapositive must be capable of being demonstrated. If the theory or hypothesis can not even accomplish that then it can not be valid.

This illustrates how, for many people, Science is something that has a logical, deductive foundation, but, as I mentioned, this is not general enough because in many instances the scientific reasoning involved is inductive rather than deductive. An example of induction would be a medical diagnosis. The distinction is that deduction moves from general statements to specific statements and since it is logical the conclusion is basically a restatement of known fact in the form of a syllogism. When doing induction the process is reversed because you generally start with some specific data and then generalize to obtain possible explanations for that data. Of course once you have a possible explanation you can then perform experimentation to determine whether your theory/hypothesis/model can make useful predictions or even recreate the original data.

What I am getting at here is that what we consider to be Science is not a static method or algorithm but a dynamic process that involves observing a phenomenon, attempting to create an explanation for the observation using induction and then, when possible, testing the explanation by showing that the model is capable of deducing the the original phenomena as an outcome. The problem in our modern society is that most people think of science as merely the deductive side of the process. They also also equate science with a result, whereas it is a process where the participants continuously challenge the hypothesis, model or theory. In fact, if you want to differentiate science and technology here is a succinct way of doing it: Science is something that must continuously prove itself, technology is its own proof.

I also don't believe that we can separate Science from scientists. Our cognition is the framework by which we evaluate the universe. We can not escape the fact that we perceive the universe as humans, although we can strive to take our perspective into account as we form our theories. For example, as humans it is virtually impossible for us to visualize four dimensions, but we can determine whether a system requires four dimensions to be properly explained and then develop mathematical tools to allow us to work in four dimensions .

At the end of the day I think that it is very important for each scientist to devise their own definition for science and be able to defend it. Here is mine:

Science is the human process of attempting to find pattern in the universe.

When I use the word "pattern" it is in the sense of information. In other words a pattern arises in the universe when there is a signal perceivable above background noise