The Nature of Science

What is science? More specifically, what makes something science? How is science distinguished from non-science or pseudoscience? These questions have been the source of debate for many centuries, even millennia. Two thousand years ago, natural philosophers disputed the very nature of matter. Was matter continuous, infinite, and divisible as claimed by Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries? Or was matter discontinuous, finite, and indivisible, so that a certain smallest, most fundamental unit could be attained, as claimed by Leucippus, Democritus, and few others. Over 2000 years ago, Leucippus coined a term for this fundamental and smallest unit of matter – atomos, yet these ideas were largely ignored for millennia.

Ancient natural philosophers probed the nature of matter with questions like, “What is a plant”? “What is water?” “What is wind”? These deep questions were pondered through the mind, and through conversation. Absent in the philosophers quest to understand the fundamental nature of matter were hypotheses, testing, observations, and model-building. In other words, these great philosophers neglected experiment. It is experimentation that distinguishes science from other realms of study. It was not until John Dalton’s Atomic Theory that a revolutionary shift in our understanding of the components that constitute matter occurred, and Dalton’s observations were rooted in experimentation.

The idea of the scientific method requires that claims are 1) falsifiable (refutable - able to be disproved) and 2) repeatable. These are often the criteria used to help distinguish science from pseudoscience. The falsifiable nature of science dictates that the claim must be able to be disproved. Note that in science, evidence may strongly suggest, but does not explicitly prove.

An example of a falsifiable claim is that the moon is made out of cheese. As silly as the claim is, we could gather a sample of the moon and – if it is not cheese – we have disproved the...