What is science?

[sweetjazz]

This post is motivated as a response to a claim in a previous thread, which I have quoted below. It is a claim I disagree with, and I find it interesting to think about the subtle difference between the claim made and the true statement which can be made that is similar to (but subtly different from) the quoted claim. Here's the claim and my response to it:

[ QUOTE ]
Science claims the universe is as we find it.

[/ QUOTE ]

This, in my opinion, is not science, although it is a very reasonable philosophical position that a person who studies science might naturally come to.

Science develops theories which allow us to predict future observations. Science, in and of itself, does NOT tell us that the laws of nature have been constant in time or that the universe has always followed the same laws. Rather, what science does is use theories, most of which incorporate fundamental laws which have been constant in time, to make predictions; and it is very successful in making predictions (much more so than anyone citing knowledge of the divine).

However, science doesn't tell us that we can definitively state that Newton's Law (suitably modified for relativistic effects of course [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] ) held twenty minutes ago. In fact, Bertrand Russell pointed out that it is entirely conceivable that the life of the earth is five minutes old, that everything came into being at that time and at which point the laws of nature work as we now understand them to (and certain biological processes take place in humans to give them the sensation of memories that never took place). Science cannot prove anything about the past, as it is a tool to turn theories into predictions about the future. There is no experimental technique that can distinguish between the existence of an objective earth twenty minutes ago and the creation of the earth five minutes ago with a set of initial conditions created by some omnipotent being. As far as science goes, the difference between the two possibilities is irrelevant (because predictions for future events are the same). As far as philosophy goes, there are good philosophical (not scientific) reasons to believe that the universe is in fact much older than five minutes. But any scientist who believed Russell's scenario was in fact the truth would be as capable a scientist as the rest of the scientists who rejected the recent spontaneous creation hypothesis of Russell. In essence, the idea that the universe is as we find it is a metaphysical belief. That theories based on the idea that the universe is as we find it have led to many successful predictions of empirical observations is a scientific fact. (Or strictly speaking is a fact about the scientific process.)

[imported_luckyme]

"Science claims the universe is as we find it"

[ QUOTE ]
This, in my opinion, is not science,

[/ QUOTE ]
Whew, then I'm glad nobody said "Science is .." because that would result in a different statement about methodology, etc. That statement could continue, " ..and not necessarily how we'd like to find it, or want to find it, or..."

"Science is a way of trying not to fool ourself." - Feynman.
If Feynman is right, and I think he is, then what it reports must claim not to fool us, but be a our best statement of what was actually found, nothing added, nothing taken away. That's not the same as claiming the universe is as it appears to be, but that the finding are extracted, tested and reported within the current theories and what is, is.

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which 'are' there. -Feynman"

That's the sense you should be getting from the original statement. Not some Kuhnian-based ( thankfully he recanted) 'battle of the paradigms' metaphysical adventure.

I simply think Feynman had it pegged.

[ QUOTE ]
Science develops theories which allow us to predict future observations.

[/ QUOTE ]

Observations of what?
You're not going to say "observations of the universe as we find it" are you? ... 'here's the test, here's what we found'.

Now, new models may have to be created, theories discarded or revamped, but at each leg of the journey science claims that what it found it found, even at those times when it can't comprehend what it found. Brownian motion was reported but not understood, but science still claimed to have witnesses "this".

luckyme