• Question: What is science?

    Asked by adamwaveymoursy to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 17 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Ollie Russell

      Ollie Russell answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Science is… The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment

    • Photo: Georgia Campbell

      Georgia Campbell answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      For me, science is an attitude! It’s a way of looking at the world, trying to make sense of it and finding explanations for how things work. It’s coming up with new ideas,and finding reliable ways to test them to see if you’re right or not. It’s about being inquisitive about what’s around you!

      As a job, science is a lot of hard work 😛 But is always interesting, and is very rewarding – for a lot of scientists, its really nice to know that our work will go towards helping people 🙂

    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hello Adam

      For me science is the need to understand the world around you, to want to fix what’s broken and to make it better. It isn’t necessarily about learning what’s in books, its about reading a book and thinking …’fair enough….but why does that happen?’

      In some ways science is about the truth! 🙂

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I see science as a method. A way of finding things out about the world

      Hello again Adam. Science is more than just a job for me. I think that even if wasn’t paid to be a scientist, I’d still think of myself as one. Science isn’t just a set of facts to learn either, but it’s the way we find out new ones.

      If we get a new set of observations that seem to contradict the current scientific theory, we’ll have two competing theories about how the world works. We can use scientific methodology to decide between these two theories. If the new data are robust, then the old theory gets overturned, and the new one becomes our “best guess”, our new theory about how the world works. Until a new set of data comes along that seems to contradict THAT!

      And so on. And on and on. As old theories get overturned by new data, we get closer and closer to the truth of how the world works. We may not ever get there, may not be able to ever describe everything exactly, but it’s still something to aim for. Something to get us out of bed in the morning. Me anyway.

      And believe me, that takes a lot sometimes. 8)

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