What is So Special About Science?

Science is an organized systematic enterprise that builds and Organizes information in the form of testable predictions and theoretical interpretations about the universe. To build science, a discipline which promotes uniform, repeatable, testable predictions and has a support system for testing and verification, it needs a background in physics, astronomy or biology. The predictions made by science are falsifiable, i.e. they can be tested and checked. Without such an elaborate background in physics, astronomy or biology it is not possible to build and organize such a vast and complex understanding about the world around us. We rely on science for weather forecasts, stock market forecasts, ocean currents and weather patterns forecasts.

If we want to continue to progress as a society, we must continue to use scientific practices in reasoning about what can and cannot be accepted as fact and what actions will produce the best results for society. Science is an open process, it is not closed like political systems or religions and it requires an objective and not subjective approach. An example of a scientific practice in reasoning is asking questions. The process of asking questions is the process of science, because without asking questions we cannot make reliable scientific claims and predictions. Questions are the starting point of scientific practices.

Scientific methods are repeatable, testable and falsifiable. A scientific method may involve any number of procedures in which an observation is made, the results are recorded and the scientific practices used to evaluate the observations are repeated in a process of diminishing degrees of precision until a test result is obtained. So a scientist cannot claim that he has discovered a new law of physics simply by doing a series of experiments with quantum mechanics. Science is also a practice of hypothesis, disproof, and evaluation of scientific techniques and methods. Science is useful in society because without science there would be no use of thermodynamics, biology would not have developed into such an intricate system as it does today, and man would not have advanced to the size of the largest galaxy.