This is both a subjective and objective question. It largely depends on who is reacting to it, in what context, and with what personal background. There is no pat answer.
What it is
The Oxford Learners Dictionaries would have us believe that science is simply, “knowledge about the structure and behavior of the natural and physical world, based on facts that you can prove….”[1] At the dictionary.com website, we find no less than seven alternative definitions.[2] We are told that the full Oxford English Dictionary has 17 definitions of the word.[3] Finally, I encourage everyone to read the Wikipedia (English) page for “science” [4] where an extensive history of the term is offered with 265 citations to background references. Relying on the first two of those citations, the Wiki-article begins with, “Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.”
I am happy with any such dry definitions of the word itself, and this last one in particular, with one addition. “About the world” is too restrictive unless “world” covers the universe outside planet Earth and all aspects of humanity, as long as that rigorous methodology is employed. I am not put off by the term science being usurped by fields outside studies of the physical universe. If it implies a factual and systematic study of anything, I am happy to share the terminology. “Social science” is one good example of that. “Political science” is both another good example of a discipline and is also an opportunity to jest a bit about some of its undisciplined practitioners. We need to be generous and avoid labeling shorthands of legitimate fields such as ‘Emotional science’ as oxymorons. [5]
What it is not
Philosophers and scientists of various persuasions (specialties) have opined on the meaning of science extensively. That is not where we are headed in this post. Our interest arises not from one or more definitions of the word but from perceptions of the term and the associated images in the public mind that pursuits in science and pronouncements issued from those activities produce. There being no all-encompassing public mind, we need to parse the audience before decrying any misconceptions.
To those gullible enough to think science is a melodrama, it is not. Indeed, the true lives of certain well-known scientists like Oppenheimer, Hawking, and Einstein have been dramatized, making excellent and intriguing biopics. Personal successes and trials and tribulations are fascinating and contagious. We are wont to associate that emotional content with the work of the principal characters. Those life events may affect the quality and quantity of work, but the work product itself is what it is, no emotion, not positive or negative. A truck driver may have a tumultuous life story, but her truck travels a quantified number of kilometers in a quantified extent of time, leaving one known origin, passing other known points on the map, and arriving at a known destination. Disease, divorce, skydiving, or dereliction of duty don’t change the data.
To those who have difficulty separating facts from exaggeration, hyperbole is not science. The best thing since sliced bread [6] provides two hyperbolic examples. First, sliced bread must have been a fantastic development. Second, the subject of the comment must be similarly great. For many qualitative practical reasons, new products that enhance our daily lives are indeed great. Nevertheless, the underlying science, whether of the chemistry of baking bread or the metallurgy of blades used to slice it, is neither fabulous nor mediocre. The science is just the collection of tests and provable outcomes that explain such things, for example, as the advent of sliced bread and that can lead to new products in the marketplace. Whether new products do arise depends on creative innovative people using whatever relevant science is available, assessing the need for the proposed product and the cost to pursue its development, and then pursuing the idea to completion, often after surmounting a series of technical obstacles.
A first caveat
Undoubtedly, in the case cited, the science of baking and blades followed their invention. Quite often, the empirical approach to devising something new succeeds long before we know why it worked. The so-called linear process where scientific discovery leads to applied science followed by technological development within one or a few engineering disciplines is a nice innovation myth. The iterative trial and error empirical approach informed but not driven by available relevant data from the latest version of a scientific knowledge base, is the typical development scenario. In the public mind, aided and abetted by press releases, any point in the described development process can be labeled as “science” when it is not. I italicize trial and error because that common phrase implies that trying something that does not work is an error. It is not. Every negative result teaches. They close unproductive paths and open new ones. Edison’s quest for a long-lasting light bulb filament is a perfect historical example of this “try and try again” approach.[7]
A second caveat
Science is the pursuit of and often successful acquisition of understanding. If that precedes its subsequent utilization in developing a tool or follows the tool’s development, how the tool is used is outside of science’s domain by definition. I say ‘by definition’ to distinguish the scientific method from science as a field of endeavor. Should science be blamed for the decision to develop and then use a nuclear weapon? Should science be blamed if and when an advanced version of AI replaces human beings (if there is anyone left with the free will to assign the blame)? Or, should science be blamed for not providing the timely fully verified facts needed to avoid calamities like climate change? If any responsibility attaches to how a tool is used, wonderful or disastrous, it belongs to the people, some of whom may indeed be the scientists themselves, who joined the development program
Uncertainty and worse
The purported final word on any topic is rarely the final word. There are laws. There are theories. There are hypotheses. There are educated guesses or conjectures. These are all useful but quite distinct. A law is the most reliable. Newton’s laws of motion [8] have been confirmed six ways to Sunday [9] as had been the separate conservation of mass and energy. Nevertheless, when special relativity and quantum mechanics came along, their validity became confined to the realm of classical systems. We can blame Einstein, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg for upsetting that applecart. A theory can be another well-tested explanation of the behavior of some system, be it the Big Bang or the Evolution of the Species. The confirmatory tests for these two, however, are not local in the laboratory. They are based on using the theory to predict a particular behavior followed by observations that tend to confirm the predictions in the relevant systems. Such theories will certainly be “adjusted” as more observations are made, possibly large adjustments.
I would label such ideas as dark matter and dark energy in the universe as hypotheses. Their proponents may call them theories, but we really have no idea what those two phenomena, invented to explain observations not otherwise understood, in fact are. These categories have fuzzy boundaries. I am uncertain as to how the description of the Earth, our Sun and planetary orbits as devised by Claudius Ptolemy should be labeled.[10] Observations were made and his theory worked until the heliocentric model of Nicolaus Copernicus shed more light.[11] As was also the case with Galileo Galilei,[12] these philosopher-scientists were condemned as heretics for their advances. Today’s scientific advances have not been immune to such vociferous skepticism.[13]
When no observations are readily available, a conjecture is always fun. Hollow Earth [14] and Flat Earth [15] are two such notions. Such conjectures are not confined to ancient history. Still today they can stay alive until debunked by science. I quote from a very recent example wherein assumptions about why woodpeckers don’t suffer concussions were laid to rest.[16]
“Shock absorption in woodpeckers is a good example of how hypotheses can spread to become common beliefs even with no scientific evidence supporting them. The combination of spectacular behavior receiving plenty of popular-media coverage and humans focusing on brain-protection adaptations when it comes to head impacts can be misguiding. The two factors may be responsible for the mythologizing of how woodpeckers avoid injury.”
Actual scientific observations showed that rather than a spongy shock-absorbing layer of intervening bone between beak and brain, a combination of brain orientation, its small size, and the short duration of a woodpecker’s peck accounts for the difference between the bird and the human football (American version) player for whom much helmet shock-absorbing design effort has occurred.
A third caveat
Everyone is free to accept, question or fully reject the findings of science. I am biased, having been trained in the sciences. I do value fact over what I might call fiction. Some fictions invoke magical alternatives. Some just conjure up legends and imaginative scripts to explain phenomena. These personal beliefs are to be respected, and if they are 180 degrees opposite to mine, that’s OK. As a practical matter, in the real world of applications, it’s only when fact-free beliefs are used to build a bridge or evaluate a vaccine, do I begin to worry.
Science per se does not need me to defend it. Well-executed research can stand on its own. Honest but poorly executed work is replaced by better efforts over time. Scientists are human too and are subject to what I like to call overly optimistic expectations. Langmuir called that pathological science [17] which is always overcome by science’s self-correcting mechanisms. Lastly, there are built-in self-policing mechanisms that ferret out fake data and charlatanism.
I expect some may push back to tell me that I am ignoring the elephant in the room, the classical assumption that science and religion are poles apart, on opposite sides of an impenetrable barrier of hardened beliefs. Well, I think we are long past when religious dogma is the basis for accusations of heresy and openly rejecting the findings of science. What we have yet to put behind us is exaggerating the implications of scientific speculations to the point of public hysteria. In that context, the question being asked is, “Is it science that provides the tools for our own extinction?” [18]
Can versus Should -- Ethical backstops?
The tenets of religion in general are very beneficial for one aspect of science's impact on society. We’ve defended the practitioners of science by saying that they ought not be blamed for how the tools based on their discoveries are used. Blame, no. But if shirking responsibility for raising an alarm when potential misuse poses a serious risk to humanity and the planet, then blame, yes. The difficulty arises when searching for criteria to judge the good versus the bad. Here is where concepts of morality and virtue, whether secular or taught to us through our faith, must enter the cost-benefit calculation for any program. Think of nuclear weapons versus nuclear power; free market versus mandated fossil fuel reduction; neural networks, machine learning, and artificial intelligence as panacea or threat; editing genomes using CRISPR-Cas9 [19]; or human cloning. I could glibly characterize the ethical battle in some cases as “greed versus altruism,” and in other cases as “irrational fear versus sensible security.” Self-preservation of the species based on seeing and avoiding the likely bad consequences (while we still have a self to preserve) is the only answer. This is not easy. There is an entire literature about “risk” -- how it’s measured and how we handle it.
Conclusion – not!
There is no conclusion to this story. Scientific understanding of phenomena, trivial and potentially horrendous, will progress. Human nature will or will not handle the ramifications sensibly or irresponsibly. Predictions now are as delicately diaphanous as the hypothesized comforting invisible aether permeating all space, a beautiful debunked concept, out-of-confirmatory-reach until superseded by a new reality.[20] Which of today’s forecasts will be relegated to the dustbin of history and which will turn out to be prophetic is beyond the domain of science to know, but will most certainly be largely determined by how its discoveries are used by our descendants, should they survive.
[1] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/science?q=science.
[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/science.
[3] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/science_n?tab=factsheet#23959055
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
[5] See "The Science of Emotion" at https://www.loc.gov/loc/brain/emotion/Damasio.html
[6] According to https://en.wiktionary.org/, this was adapted from the advertising slogan used in 1928 by the Chillicothe Baking Company, the first company to sell sliced bread.
[7] https://fi.edu/en/science-and-education/collection/edisons-lightbulb
[8] https://www.britannica.com/science/Newtons-laws-of-motion
[9] https://hotidioms.com/2013/01/08/six-ways-tofrom-sunday/
[10] https://www.britannica.com/science/Ptolemaic-system
[11] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicolaus-Copernicus
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
[13] Will Storr, “The Heretics: Adventures With The Enemies Of Science,” (Picador, 2013)
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
[16] Sam Van Wassenbergh and Maja Mielke, “Why woodpeckers don’t get concussions,” Physics Today, 77 (1) January 2024, pg. 54-55
[17][ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science
[18] See T. A. Harper, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/opinion/polycrisis-doom-extinction-humanity.html
[19] https://www.newscientist.com/definition/what-is-crispr/
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
Nota Bene: Others may ruminate differently. But be warned: In my case, seeing or hearing something quite trivial -- a saying, a store clerk’s mannerisms, or bad grammar on a food product’s label – triggers a stream-of-consciousness extrapolation toward grander notions and generalizations. That is what often happens in these posts. ADDENDUM: Those subscribers who have been here for a while will have noticed that at times ruminations have veered into diatribes. I make no apology. I just want my readers to know that it’s quite intentional. When events come close to making the ‘blood boil,’ that discontent bubbles up here.
Disclaimer: Any and all opinions expressed here are my own at the time of writing with no expectation that they will hold beyond my next review of this article. Opinions are like a river, winding hither and yon, encountering obstacles and rapids, and suffering turbulent mixing of silts from its depths and detritus from its banks. But just as a river has its clear headwaters and a fertile delta, so do opinions, notwithstanding any intervening missteps and uncertainties.
Reminder: You can visit the Cycloid Fathom Technical Publishing website at cycloid-fathom.com and the gallery at cycloid-fathom.com/gallery.
Forthcoming posts (unless life intervenes)
If a tree falls…
…objective versus subjective reality
Sched 4/8/2024
Car Park
…Symptoms of going nowhere fast
Sched 4/15/2024
The color of color
…What you see is what you see
Sched 4/22/2024
Repetitive Objects Found
…curiosity runs amok
Sched 4/29/2024
Conflict Zones
…Sticks and stones…
Sched 5/6/2024
Quantify me
…metiri, aestimare, iudicare aliquid* (…measure, estimate, judge something)
Sched 5/13/2024