• Question: What is your definition of science?

    Asked by epsilon465 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 25 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      Science is the use of inductive reasoning – doing controlled experiments to prove or disprove theories. You have ideas (hypotheses) and then come up with ways to test them with experiments. You keep doing experiments, and if the experiments find slightly different results from theories, you try to find out why. It’s a messy process that never 100% proves anything, but your continually building and refining our picture of the universe. There’s also an element of ‘reductionism’ – making theories simpler and simpler, trying to find more fundamental principles.

    • Photo: Robert Woolfson

      Robert Woolfson answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      Short answer – Science is fun. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the cheesy answer)

      I’m not entirely sure what science is. For me,it’s much the same as Sam. I like to take an idea and find an experiment to see if it works. If it works, great. Time for the bar. If not, I go away and figure out why it didn’t and what I can do to make it work.

      When you do this time after time, you begin to get a really detailed understanding of your idea and what affects it. When thousands of people do this with thousands of different ideas, you start to build up a picture of the world.

      Then, you get some genius who comes along, takes all these ideas and details and turns them into simple theories (the reductionism Sam mentioned) that let everyone else understand what’s going on.

      Then that theory is tested with ideas, and so on and so forth.

    • Photo: Matthew Pankhurst

      Matthew Pankhurst answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      Science is a method to know things with certainty. It’s a way of getting closer and closer to the truth, and separates belief (thinking you know something) from truth (knowing you know something)…..!

    • Photo: Claire Lee

      Claire Lee answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      Science is about questioning – not just blindly believing. It’s about always wanting to search for the final, deepest, most correct, and most beautiful answer. It’s about figuring it out for yourself, and never being completely comfortable with something until you can explain it to a 5 year old, or your grandma 🙂

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