Science. What is it?
That is both an easy and a hard question to answer. Easy because we can simply say "it is what scientists do" or "it is a system of knowledge acquisition" and we have answered the question.
But these sorts of answers are a bit like answering the question "why is the sky blue?" with "because that is the colour that it is." Not really informative and not really answering the question.
However, to really answer the question is much more difficult and not without controversy. After all, it is something like defining "democracy" - you know it when you see it but everybody has a slightly different definition.
I was asked recently to talk about "what is science?" and I came across a talk given by Richard Feynman in 1966 to the National Science Teachers Association. It had a particularly provocative and perceptive definition of science that certainly resonated with my way of thinking.
To understand Feynman's definition, we have to back up a bit in time and understand the decision tree that all animals make.
Consider the scenario in which you are sleeping in the woods and you hear a rustling in the leaves.
You basically have two responses. The first is to ignore the sound and go back to sleep and the second is to respond to the sound by becoming more alert and ready to take action in case it is a predator.
If you choose the first course of action and it is just the wind or something friendly rustling the bushes then nothing much happens except you get some extra sleep.
If you choose the second course of action and it is just the wind or whatever, again nothing much comes of it except you lose some sleep which probably doesn't have any serious consequences.
However, things get much more serious if the rustling of the leaves is actually a predator. In the first instance, falling back to sleep will invariably mean that you will be caught, killed, and eaten while in the second scenario, your alertness means that you are more likely to survive the encounter by either fleeing or fighting.
In other words, not taking action is much more likely to be hazardous to your health than taking action. More to the point, those animals that don't take action don't survive to reproduce. They are not our ancestors and their genes are breed out of the population. This is, in part, how instincts arise.
Of course humans developed speech and the capacity to learn through communication. We were no longer learning just through trial-and-error or instinct. We could warn each other that a rustling noise might mean. We developed a racial memory. Those that refused to listen never became our ancestors.
This led to the development of belief systems. Unfortunately, cause-and-effect relationships that may have nothing to do with one another could still become beliefs. That the rustling in the grass at night might be a predator is a sensible belief. That thunder and lightning mean that the gods are angry is not.
Or, at least, that is how some people see it. For some people, the causal relationship needs to be more substantial. It is not enough to say that lightning occurs because Zeus is angry. Questions about how does he make lightning and why is he angry and what does it mean need More elaborate beliefs - our myths and legends - have emerged with time. For Feynman, this represented an illness and science was the cure. That is, science is the candle in the dark that shines a light on the myths and legends, grounding them in cold hard facts. Science is grounded in experimental observations that are reproducible.
For example, there is a commercial on television for popcorn that claims to be doing science. The spokesman sets up the scenario. A movie theatre is divided in half. One half is given Orville Redenbacher's Movie Popcorn or something like that. The other is given nothing.
At the end of the movie, the audience is polled and asked how much they enjoyed the movie. Those that had popcorn rated the movie much higher than those without. The spokesman gleefully points out that their popcorn makes movies better. Science proves it.
Nothing of the kind has been demonstrated. A scientist would point out that unless both sides were given popcorn, then it isn't a fair test. And unless the experiment is done as a double blind with no one - experimenters and movie attendees alike - having any idea which popcorn was being eaten, then it is not really science. But the company wants you to think that their experiment is science.
Of course, my response is "prove it."
