Science As A Way of Thinking

I meant to write this post a while ago, but I never got a chance. I guess this post, will form the basis to some of my future posts as well as some previous ones. It might be long, but if you happened to like some of my serious posts then I recommend you read on…

When you ask the average person what science is, he/she would most likely remember science class from school. The fact is, we learn science starting from grade one, and continue all the way into high school, and at the end, we don’t really know anything about science.

When I say science here, I don’t mean scientific facts or formulas; rather, I am talking about a way of thinking.

I owe my true understanding to this way of thinking to my physics high school who always emphasized labs, and more specifically the sources of error in the labs. He always told us to not worry about our data as long as we understood what the experiment was trying to achieve. He had learned the hard way while he was completing his masters. After finishing his research, he found the data that he got to fit his hypothesis. But when his results were reviewed, his supervisor pointed out that the error bars rendered the data meaningless. In other words, he could not come out with a proper conclusion from his research.

My definition of science is by no means perfect or complete, but I like to think that at least I know the basics. Science starts with an observation or a hypothesis, someone comes along and says I think there’s a relationship between so and so. The scientist then conducts experiments that are directly related to the hypothesis in hopes to prove it. When the data is collected, trends are looked for. Sometimes the trends prove the hypothesis, other times they disprove it, other times they show no trend at all. The key part of science comes from this next step. Once the scientific “discovery” is made, it is then put up for scrutiny by experts of the topic of research. Sometimes the same experiments are repeated (by other scientists) to double check the data, and confirm the discovery. Once everything is double checked, the discovery is official.

In my opinion, it’s the scrutiny that makes science so special. There are no exceptions when it comes to science, there’s no faith involved, everything is taken at face value. Best of all, there’s no such thing as superiority. Theories that have existed for centuries, can be easily put aside when another theory comes along and proves to be more accurate, most known example being Newtonian Physics.

If there’s one thing that I would want you to get out of this post, is the fact that science is way of thinking, not so much what we learn at school. What we learn at school are the byproducts of science, not science. Science is about questioning our surroundings, challenging existing beliefs and thoughts, and trying to understand all that surrounds us. Why settle for having faith in something, if you can question it?

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