When people think of Science, they generally picture a smart guy in a lab coat in front of a chalkboard full of unintelligible equations, or perhaps in a laboratory. But in reality, Science is all around us, in everything we see and experience. Everything a human experiences in life is perceived through our senses. If we can see and hear, much of the information we receive about the world around us travels to us in wavelengths that we perceive as colors, shapes, and sounds. But in reality all that we think we know about the world is constantly travelling throughout the universe in waves of particles.
For a scientific hypothesis to become a theory, a scientist needs to collect empirical data about their idea. It must be able to be observed and /or measured in some way, or at least demonstrated with mathematical equations or models that cannot be argued with. A good scientist trusts no theories or thought that came before him or her. They must question everything and approach their subject matter with a completely open mind. Science and the way we think about physics changes all the time in a progressive manner. For that to happen, everything we think we know must be examined. The parts of older theories that can be kept usually are, and other parts can be disproven by new or previously undiscovered knowledge; and replaced. In a sense, the scientific field of physics is always (and must) evolving.
In the book by Max Born, called 'Einstein's Theory of Relativity' he says that because of Newton's objections to the idea of an ether that was flexible (back then referred to as 'Corpuscular' light theory) the ideas of light travelling in waves, or 'Wave Theory' were held back for hundreds of years in the world of science. Finally Maxwell in the nineteenth century was able to prove wave theory (see the section about 'Light') which influenced Einstein's theories about special and general relativity.
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Definition of 'Science': from Wikipedia
Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge" is the effort to discover, and increase human understanding of how the physical works. Through controlled methods, science uses observable physical evidence of natural phenomena to collect data, and analyzes this information to explain what and how things work. Such methods include experimentation that tries to simulate natural phenomena under controlled conditions and thought experiments. Knowledge in science is gained through research.
Well into the eighteenth century, science and natural philosophy were not quite synonymous, but only became so later with the direct use of what would become known formally as the scientific method, which was earlier developed during the Middle Ages and early modern period in Europe and the Middle East (see History of scientific method). Prior to the 18th century, however, the preferred term for the study of nature was natural philosophy.... By contrast, the word "science" in English was still used in the 17th century to refer to the Aristotelian concept of knowledge.
By the early 1800s, natural philosophy had begun to separate from philosophy, though it often retained a very broad meaning. In many cases, science continued to stand for reliable knowledge about any topic, in the same way it is still used in the broad sense (see the introduction to this article) in modern terms such as library science, political science, and computer science. In the more narrow sense of science, as natural philosophy became linked to an expanding set of well-defined laws (beginning with Galileo's laws, Kepler's laws, and Newton's laws for motion), it became more popular to refer to natural philosophy as natural science. Over the course of the nineteenth century, moreover, there was an increased tendency to associate science with study of the natural world (that is, the non-human world). This move sometimes left the study of human thought and society (what would come to be called 'social science'. end of Wikipedia excerpt(editor's note: 'social' science is more often referred to as 'anthropology'.)
However, in this section of the website as well as the Mathematics and Scientists sections, our primary focus will be on physical science, or Physics. We will also be discussing anthropology, however; as it has many relevant applications in other key topics to this website, namely; Evolution, Symbols, and Religion (and spirituality).
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