What is Science

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What is Science Essay Incomplete The word "science" means "knowledge." The baseline definition of "science," then, is human knowledge. Empirical thought is founded on the idea that all knowledge of the world comes from sensory experience; this sensory experience can be trusted to give us an accurate picture of the world. From sensory experience, we can derive the principles whereby the world works by observing phenomena repeatedly and in controlled circumstances. Empiricism, then, is knowledge that is derived through experience. Empiricism, then, is knowledge that is derived through experience Science is the concerted human effort to understand, or to understand better, the history of the natural world and how the natural world works, with observable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding1. If scientists are constantly trying to make new discoveries or to develop new concepts and theories, then the body of knowledge produced by science should undergo constant change. Such change is progress toward a better understanding of nature. It is achieved by constantly questioning whether our current ideas are correct. As the famous American astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) put it, "Question everything". The result is that theories come and go, or at least are modified through time, as old ideas are questioned and new evidence is discovered. In the words of Karl Popper, "Science is a history of corrected mistakes", and even Albert Einstein remarked of himself "That fellow Einstein . . . every year retracts what he wrote the year before". Science is the observation of natural events and conditions in order to discover facts about them and to formulate laws and principles based on these facts. Academic Press Dictionary of Science & Technology --------------------------------------------------------------------- Science is an intellectual activity carried on by humans that is designed to discover information about the natural world in which humans live and to discover the ways in which this information can be organized into meaningful patterns. A primary aim of science is to collect facts (data).

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