• Question: Is science anything more than just knowledge?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      science is the search for knowledge. It’s not just like saying “I have a pen”, it’s saying “what can I do with this pen?” “How is this pen made?” “What happens if I do this thing to this pen?” etc

      Science is the question, knowledge is the answer.

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Well said Aimee 😉

      I’d just like to add that science is also about understanding. Understanding is so much more than just a huge collection of unrelated facts, it’s about organizing that amount of knowledge into a coherent and consistent way. I think it might be that understanding that allows one to ask the right questions, too.

      So science is a lot about producing a comprehensible explanation of an aspect of nature (which, of course, requires knowledge), and because of that it always allows to make predictions.

      Knowing that the current population of the UK is 63 million people doesn’t allow you to say if the population will raise or decline in the coming decades. But understanding what are the relevant factors in how populations increase and migrate around the planet, the factors that influence birth rates and immigration, (and knowing what are those specific factors for the UK specifically), will allow you to tell how and why the UK population changes.

      Similarly (a bit more abstract example), knowing that things fall and that planets follow and elliptical orbits doesn’t tell you what is causing this motion. Even if you knew about gravity, it still doesn’t tell you why gravity works the way it works, why massive things attract each other.

    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I would like to add that science is also about the “method” you use to understand something. No matter how hard the problem, if you approach it in the correct, methodical way, then you should be able to understand it. If you have understood it correctly, then someone else who comes along should be able to repeat your experimental method and get the same results.

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Definitely, as everyone else has said. Science is about the search for knowledge or attempting to understand how and why everything is as it is. But, I’d say most importantly, science is a way of thinking. It’s about forgetting what you believe (or want to believe) and basing everything on evidence. If you can prove it, then it’s science, if you can’t prove it then it isn’t! That’s pretty fundamental!

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