What is Science?
The word science wears many masks: a method, a body of knowledge, a labor, an institution, and a faith. These things overlap, but they are not the same.
The classic definition of science is hypothesize-test-conclude then rinse, repeat. The scientist will form a question, design some tests around that question, make a conclusion based on the results, then form a new question. More precisely this paradigm is the scientific method. This is mostly fiction in my experience. It is taught to school children as a fact about the world, in the same way that we teach government as a fact of the world, or addition, or art history. Everyday scientists do not hold the scientific method inside their waking thoughts as they go about their job. They are not discovering nature from scratch. They are using inherited facts, instruments, models, and techniques, and rarely, if ever, deriving their own.
Most professional scientists are actually doing something closer to engineering. Contemporary scientists are concerned with constructing reality from within predefined bodies of knowledge. Matter itself has become the lathe. Scientists can construct cures to diseases, we can create new phases of substance, we can build wilder and wilder machines, and algorithms, and we do so using a predefined set of facts that allow us to create.
There are some scientists who probe the limits of these predefined bodies, those who form hypotheses and conduct tests, and they probably act out something like the scientific method, but I don’t think they are consciously aware of it. We are all just going about our day like any other animal.
If we think a little larger we can consider the total body of knowledge that has been produced by the scientific method. All things known or discovered by humans via the scientific method are inside this category. Now we have a real object called science that we can reference. When we say a thing is scientific then we are referencing the body of knowledge defined by science. If we say something is a scientific fact then we are saying we arrived at this conclusion via the scientific method.
The human element of science is the most widely overlooked by society, and by scientists themselves. The body of people that enact science day-to-day, the scientists themselves, those who guard the body of knowledge defined by science, who govern and decide how new knowledge is incorporated into science, and these are often mutually exclusive people among the larger group, they all together form the body politic of science. Perhaps now we can define the capital-S Science, the political force behind the body of knowledge. It is romantic to imagine this political body as a temple of monks, of puritanical rationalists, or of fanatical logicians who just wish to spread the good word of the scientific method. There are many clowns who play out that character for public entertainment.
Truthfully the political body of Science is human and shares the same grace as all political humans, of greed, of rage, of sloth, of cowardice. Ultimately, the political force behind Science is doing what political forces do: seek power and ensure their own endurance. They have been successful in this endeavor. Scientists have owned a seat at the geopolitical table for some time now, at least since World War II. In our modern age of bioengineering and artificial intelligence it feels that Science has more political power than ever.
Finally, let’s come back to the first definition that we so carelessly tossed aside. I hold a deep conflict about science in my heart. On the one hand, I have seen that there are many truths and much knowledge in this world and science does not hold a monopoly on either truth or knowledge. How can we measure the impact of Marx versus Oppenheimer? Both have defined human history. Both are worth knowing.
But I cannot ignore, and I have seen it with my own eyes, the universe does seem to follow some laws that transcend the silly creations of humans like government or art history. The scientists we have today are sorry arbiters of this knowledge. We should not let their incompetence dissuade us from seeking out the metaphysical truth, if it should exist at all.