What science was: a brief history of science
Plato’s Philosophy was developed and written over 2,000 years ago; yet, his writings continue to influence how philosophers, theologians, and scientists view the delineation between Religion and Science and how they are two very different ways of knowing. (Image Credit: Microsoft)
The idea of science has developed over thousands of years. While early humans likely recognized the difference between internal human feelings and emotions from the outside, physical world, our first definition of Science doesn’t appear until Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher from a city in modern-day Turkey, who defined it as the “discovery of nature” (c. 585 B.C.). His definition was the first to delineate an understanding of a physical world separate from the arbitrary acts of gods or the supernatural. However, it wasn’t until a century later when the writings of Plato (428 - 347 B.C.) and the discoveries of his student, Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.) helped to create a method for studying the natural world. Aristotle published this general framework in his book Physics(350 B.C.), which looked at the study of nature and the study of motion. Plato and Aristotle’s general idea of how science comes to know was still the basis for scientific inquiry for more than a thousand years when Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642 A.D.) began his scientific revolution. In Galileo’s lifetime, he made many important discoveries (including that the Earth was not the center of the Universe) and wrote about it. By the end of his lifetime, academia and society began to recognize science as a separate, distinct discipline with its own method and philosophical system. These ideas were forwarded by Galileo’s contemporary, René Descartes (1596 - 1650 A.D.), who gives us the basis of our current understanding of Science and the foundation for the modern Scientific Method (as McLelland states in her article).
What Science is
If you noticed, the last discipline in the table on the previous page was “Science,” which is based on our modern definition of Science. McLelland gives a very concise definition in her article, “The Nature of Science and the Scientific Method” (page 1), but here we will expand upon her definition to incorporate our new understanding of Critical Thinking and Epistemological Approach:
"Science is a way of knowing that seeks to understand the physical universe and its natural phenomena through observation, measurement, and constant evaluation and reevaluation of logical interpretations.”
While this definition seems rather flat and uninspiring, we have to think about science as dynamic. In practice, it is a way for us to discover what we didn’t know before! If you want to keep track of current scientific discoveries, visit the National Science Foundations “Discovery” page from time to time. You may be surprised at what we are learning about the natural world every day.