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Asked by to Sam, Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sarah on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Sam Connolly answered on 17 Jun 2014:
Science is the study of the whole universe and everything in it. The aim of science is to understand how everything works and why everything happens – biology tries to explain how different forms of life work, chemistry tries to work out how chemicals work and interact and physics tries to work out everything to do with forces and energy, like how movement, light, gravity, magnetism and electricity work. A lot of astronomy is physics, with a bit of chemistry (and a tiny bit of biology sometimes, though there’ll be more if we find alien life!).
There’s a particular approach to finding things out in science, which is called the ‘scientific method’. All it means is that everything you find out is through experiments which give you evidence, then you base your theories on the evidence. All science research is some variation of that idea.
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Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:
Sam’s answer is fantastic! The only thing that I could possibly add to it I think is that more broadly speaking, science is about asking questions and searching for the answers for those questions, no matter how big or small they are! Not all science needs to change the world!
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Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:
Science is a way to look at everything that surrounds us and ask questions that can be answered either by experiment or by observation. In this way we can determine which of our ideas about reality are true and which are false.
In reality, things are a bit more complicated because all the observations and experiments we make are somewhat imprecise: we can only look at things up to a certain detail, and so for example it gets more and more difficult to observe the universe the further out you go because galaxies become fainter and more difficult to spot with telescopes.
What that means is that we can often only say that some things are true or false with a certain probability — but never 100%. So for example last year the Higgs boson was discovered at CERN. In reality, we are not 100% sure that the Higgs boson is really there, but “only” 99.99997% sure. That’s what it takes before you can say to have discovered something in physics!
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Nate Bastian answered on 25 Jun 2014:
I think I would add to Sam’s and Roberto’s fantastic answers, that science the direct extension of what we do in our lives all the times, just making it more systematic. When we’re children, we are learning about the world around us all the time, doing this, leads to that (touching a burner hurts, so i won’t do that again, etc). We aren’t born knowing about the world around us, we need to experience it to learn how it works. And this lasts our whole lives.
Science is the same thing, but just a bit more systematic, as we are asked show our experiments and results to others, for them to test what we found. Much of science and technology is based on trail and error, and you take what you learn and apply it to the next problem.
So, science isn’t separate to our lives, all of us are doing it, all the time, learning about the world around us.
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