What is Science?
by Dr. Robert Sprackland

Scientists are people, and as such often hold viewpoints that other scientists find controversial or outright wrong. As humanity enters the 21st century, its scientists disagree about many significant ideas: Is dark matter really the predominant “stuff” in the universe? What, precisely, is life? Is it possible to exceed the speed of light? What is a species? When does a human life begin? Can we genetically engineer people to live forever? There is no shortage of questions for science to investigate.

But there is one matter about which most scientists are in agreement: The populace of the industrialized nations are scientifically illiterate well out of proportion to their place in the world. Following the launching of Sputnik in 1957 and its subsequent beginning of the space race, the United States and its allies worked to improve their lagging school science curricula. Science, and its attendants mathematics and technology, received national attention, financing, and promotion as never before. After the successful Apollo missions that landed men on the moon and returned them safely science education began a steady decline, with institutions forced increasingly to abandon basic science for the commercially self-sufficient applied sciences. Humanity had reached the moon, fulfilling the national mission of the 1960s. Now NASA had to justify its future expenses and projects.
The “manifest destiny” of the space program was as doomed as Tang commercials; NASA had to show how it would be commercially beneficial. No matter how scientifically important or informative, all missions would ultimately be forced to answer to the bottom line. The net result has further marginalized science as a general school discipline, and the result is that our society is working—actively and consciously—to become more and more scientifically illiterate.

On the one hand we might expect people to think that sound carries in space, for what would the Star Wars series or Star Trek be like if explosions in space were properly depicted as silent? How can we blame people for thinking that an object launched off a cliff will move in a straight line, stop, and then fall downwards when only some 12% of high school graduates ever take a physics course while perhaps 90% have “learned” their physics watching Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons? Scientists have loudly and frequently mounted educational offenses against these artistic licenses, but the ability to compete is severely hampered by, as usual, that ultimate yardstick of human success, money. I cannot believe that I have a single colleague on earth who was surprised to learn that the money spent in producing the first Jurassic Park motion picture exceeded all the funding spent on all scientific paleontology worldwide since the field began in the middle 1800s. Given the phenomenal discrepancy between scientific funding and the money on hand for entertainment businesses, how can science possibly hope to compete? More to the point, how can science be expected to improve scientific literacy among the populace?

This book is an answer to a vacuum formed by scientists and that has led, in part, to science being given the often short shrift it has received. For centuries, but most notably during the 20th century with the advent of the atomic age, scientists have claimed that science is a particular way of knowing, but is distinct from philosophy and questions of ethics and morality. I strongly dispute that view. While science is indeed a specific path to the gathering, analyzing, and interpretation of phenomena, such methods do not negate the ability of science to ask hard ethical questions and provide answers founded on the same principles as the rest of science. Because the practice of science is framed by certain distinct and well-worn methods, the use of these methods to tackle ethical questions is not a violation of scientific integrity. I shall show in these pages how science and philosophy, particularly ethics, can and must be enjoined. As scientists we can no longer lament the lack of scientific savvy, the prevalence of bogus belief systems, and the objectionable use of our work. Scientists of all stripes are, and must be, educators; we must be defenders of our work, our beliefs, and the principles upon which we have founded our lives. After all, if we don’t, who will?

There are four cornerstones to the thesis of this book. They are science, philosophy, morality, and ethics. Science and law are similar in several respects, one of which is that we labor to use terms in very specific ways, giving each word a precise definition. In this book I shall focus on four very specific terms. These terms may be briefly defined as follows:

Ethics: (GR ??????, proper conduct) The discipline of dealing with what are good and bad, and with moral duties and obligations.
Morals: (L morales, custom) Customs pertaining to right and wrong.
Philosophy: (GR ????, love plus ?????, wisdom) A search for understanding of
the grounds of ideas and reality.
Science: (L sciere, to know) Inquiry into the phenomena of the universe by means of careful data collection and analysis, testing of hypotheses with objective standards, and without recourse to supernatural explanations.

Defining Science

At the most basic level we see scientific illiteracy in the inability of most people to do so simple a task as define what is meant by “science.” How can a person possibly understand a field if he or she does not even understand what that field represents? True, many high school students are able to parrot an answer such as “scientists use the scientific method,” which is both tautological and devoid of any true information content. It is therefore appropriate to begin this book by clearly defining the meaning of the term “science” and the procedures that represent the work of scientists.

Science is one of several approaches used by humans to interpret the world and universe around them. In attempting to explain this universe a follower of scientific principles starts an inquiry with as few presuppositions as possible. One of the basic presuppositions that science employs is that what we perceive as reality is, in fact, real. We are not Plato’s eidos, the ideas of reality reflected on the mind of a god, nor Confucius’s butterfly dreaming we are humans. While a scientist does not dismiss these ideas as impossible, they are both extraordinary images that defy any way to be tested. Models that claim reality is not something that humans actually perceive are impotent constructs, for in a world where reality is unknowable, everything is unknowable. Any knowledge we could glean would be conditional. As an example, we all suspend our sense of reality when we watch Star Wars, because so much of its “reality” defies known principles of physics. There are no known optical rules that even remotely allow for a meter-long shaft of powerful burning light that is represented by the light saber. We can accept the light saber as the equivalent of a super high tech samurai sword, but few of us actually believe that such a weapon is, or could be, reality. In short, we accept that perceived reality is real simply because it is the only reality to which we have access. If our reality is not real, then we are still limited to interpreting our reality from the viewpoint of being in that non-reality. We may thus talk about limitations of light saber use and technology while also acknowledging that we are talking about a fantasy world in which there is no corresponding reality in our universe. I must admit that I am a science fiction fan and thoroughly enjoy the Star Wars films, but I also know that they are fantasies and do not in any way reflect reality. As a scientist I am not enjoined to dislike fantasy simply because I know it is not reality.

What, then, is reality? This question has been a central concern to philosophers and theologians for millennia, and the answers each group accepts vary considerably. While the philosopher may claim, “I think, therefore I am,” a more discriminating soul might acknowledge that absolute knowledge is probably unattainable and claim “I think I think, therefore I think I think I am…” Neither position does anything except reinforce the idea that ultimate knowledge is impossible to prove.

In contrast, the scientist starts from the simple position that this reality is the only one I have access to: it is the reality in which I live and work. By any rational standard, then, this is the reality I must deal with, because this is my reality. Frankly, if this is not reality, it makes little difference because it is still the stage on which the acts of our lives must be played—we have no other stage on which we may exist. From a purely pragmatic standpoint we accept perceived reality as real because we have no other choice, and more to the point, we have no other choice that matters.

This brings us to the second important criterion of science as a discipline, the ability to measure our reality. What we see, hear, touch, all provide measurable data that can be quantified as well as qualified. This input of sensory information is termed “observation,” and includes all the measurable information we can obtain about any object or activity in reality. Our sensory data are limited to four frames of reference that are termed “dimensions,” and all are familiar to us. Length, width, and height describe the physical features of an object, and represent the classical three dimensions referred to in the term “3-D.” There is also an intangible dimension, time, that also defines the features of an object. For example, if we describe the Brooklyn Bridge in terms of 3-D, we can have a very good rendition of the bridge made as a mental image, a painting, a scale model, or even a duplicate. But we must also describe that bridge in terms of “when,” for it did not exist as a complete bridge prior to 1878, and it will not exist after some future date. Therefore, if we are using reality coordinates to describe the bridge we must include its physical (3-D) description plus its time description. Go to the right place at the wrong time and there’s no bridge.

Scientists use all the available 4-D data they can obtain for some questions, such as particulars of quantum mechanics and warped space-time calculations. In other cases we may sift through data and select useful from uninformative (and sometimes useless) data. A physician, for example, does not need to provide all the information she can obtain from a patient being treated for a sore throat. She need not record that Mrs. Jones is five-foot four, has two arms with five fingers on each hand, each finger bearing a nail and each finger capable of bending at three joints, the joints being made of bone linked by a fluid filled cartilaginous chamber… In fact, we need know little more that the condition of Mrs. Jones’s throat, her reaction, if any, to drugs, and note a few other symptoms. All that other information about Mrs. Jones, while true, is uninformative.
One of the goals of a scientific education is to learn how to evaluate useful information as distinct from uninformative data. In a traditional educational regimen, high school and undergraduate university science classes teach students “facts,” the foundation information about the disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics that have been gleaned by scientists. The focus is on the corpus of acquired knowledge, with relatively little emphasis on how that knowledge was acquired. Lab exercises are more often of a demonstrational nature, letting students see how hydrolysis occurs or what the inside of a real heart looks like. Lab manuals are cookbooks, giving step-by-step instructions to get students to particular goals. The reality of science, that most experiments provide negative results and need to constantly be retooled before a proper answer is found, is absent in all but a select few basic science curricula.

At the master’s degree level students are immersed in more fact-accumulation about a specific field, and they may conduct some degree of research. Still, the focus is on how to do experimental work rather than how to design and interpret such work. It is the doctoral student—a research student—who is finally allowed to see how the scientific process works in our reality. It is predominantly at the doctoral level that the incipient researcher first understands that scientists do not wake up each morning and bound out of bed crying “I shall be brilliant today!”

My point in outlining the course of conventional scientific training is this: we teach science first as a collection of facts that “just are,” at least as a student sees them. Grammar school children are taught science in the same way that they learn about English grammar, history, and mathematics. The facts are the facts because, well, they just are… it’s in the book. I think I detest few phrases as much as “it’s in the book.” As an author and teacher I know too well that books can be wrong, evasive, or incomplete. The lag time between manuscript and published book virtually guarantees that something in the text will be outdated before the print is dry. Most texts are written by committee that, in my experience, is the biggest red flag signaling probable errors I’ve encountered. The reality of science is that scientists are always trying to revise the book by making new discoveries that replace, modify, or expand upon the already known. Committing fact to print does not make them immutable; neither does it necessarily make them facts. The constant probing, re-evaluating, and updating that are the very heart of science are realities that grammar and secondary school students rarely see. Only a small percent of high school graduates will go on to major in university science, and of those who do, only a smaller percent will go on to graduate work. Because we generally restrict the teaching of the true nature of science, as an activity, to graduate students, we may rightfully ask: “Is it any wonder our populace is so abysmally scientifically illiterate?” My answer: No!

How, then, does science differ from other disciplines, other “ways of knowing?” Perhaps humanity’s oldest way of knowing is art, for in depicting reality physically we may share our perceptions with others. Art may be highly stylized and abstract, using stick figures for people and animals, or it may have all the three-dimensional grace of a Da Vinci painting or statue. Because art may be entirely subjective, people can depict objects and events that never happened just as easily as historical events. Art, then, need not be restricted to reality, but may entertain fantasy, imagination, or outright lies, ranging from Mickey Mouse to Escher. It may reflect reality faithfully or as a coded abstract. Reality, then, is not a definitional or essential aspect of art.

Theology uses simple explanations that are based on faith. One must accept an explanation because someone in authority says it is to be accepted. Lightning is actually thunderbolts hurled by one god at another. Why? Why not? Thunder is God bowling. How do I know? Because my grandmother told me so. If I accept such answers and their dubious reasoning, I cannot be a scientist. The very act of questioning such answers is generally seen as blasphemous, and many religions have persecuted such doubters with harsh punishments. If I proceed and find out that lightning is simply an exchange of ions between clouds or between a cloud and the ground, I may be persecuted to silence or even death. Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment (house arrest in his own home) for his astronomical discoveries. Forced to recant his published observations in front of the church authorities he reputedly murmured as he turned to leave: “but it still moves!”

Within the same historical era the church was burning people at the stake for questioning whether or not Jesus owned the clothes he wore!

It is true that some theologians loosen their grips on their followers so that the great discrepancies between observed reality and theological dogma do not lead to increased desertions from the religion. For example, the Catholic Church acknowledged the reality of biological evolution and supported Charles Darwin’s theory for what it was. The historical footnote by the Pope was that the body belongs to science, but the soul remains property of the church. Given that there is no empirical evidence for the reality of “souls,” science and Catholicism have no conflict on this particular issue.

In theology, then, we see efforts to explain observable phenomena such as lightning and the movements of the stars, but the final recourse is always to seek a supernatural—meaning above the laws of nature and thereby unknowable from our reality—cause. Theological answers were based on suppositions or very limited, often faulty, testing. Consider the “test” to see if a person was a witch. Tie the person hand and foot, then toss them in a lake. If they floated, it was because they were possessed, and needed to be retrieved and burned alive. If they sank and drowned, they were innocent—but also dead! Theological investigations often follow from mixed and faulty premises. In this example the church was correct that there were witches. Pagans who worshipped nature and the earth and follow the guidelines of peace and harmony with living things are known as Wiccans, a term that in old English was transformed into “witches.” On the count that Wiccans were demonic, however, the church was wrong. These witches were neither possessed by demons nor were followers of the Christian construct known as the devil. The Pagans accepted the path of neither Christ nor Satan, but in the times when the church was also the major political force in Europe, the official stance was “you are with us or you are demonic.” Such absolutism, ignoring the great range of gray scale between the poles, is anathema to science and its methods. Theology cannot be science so long as it is willing to defer to supernatural or simply convenient explanations for reality.

Philosophy is a fascinating school, for it is the ultimate grounding in word games. Philosophers are not restricted by the nature of evidence they use, taking freely from science and religion as they suit a particular viewpoint. The only proofs offered are again based on word games and the logic of word usage. Supplanting grammar for grounding and syntax for science, a philosopher can propose almost any model of reality, then provide a “logical construct” to make the premise sound practical. On the one hand we may encounter a close approach to accepting reality as reality: “I think, therefore I am.” At the other extreme we encounter the proposition that if reality is not real, we have no way to know this because all our observations are false. Of course both propositions are beyond any ability to test for truth, but only the former tells us, in essence, that this is all we get so we’d better act as if our reality is reality. Philosophers can get into some really interesting verbal combat over their viewpoints, but only the realists can marshal anything we could call evidence.

Of course there is an important role to be played by philosophy, in that it allows us to explore a range of possibilities that we might otherwise not consider. Philosophy helps us answer questions of morality and utility, such as “should we do X” or “how might we achieve X?” It provides the fences within which we place our reason and rational selves, but like all good fences it both serves as a boundary marker and yet is capable of being moved. We might find that a subject is less well understood than we thought and thus bring in our philosophical fences. This is certainly the case in the astronomical field of cosmology. For many years we lived with a paradigm that matter was the only real “stuff” in the universes. Then along came the concept of dark matter, which is still presumed by some researchers to represent the bulk of the “stuff” (for lack of a more meaningful term). Matter’s importance thereby was limited and the philosophical fences brought closer together. In the past year, though, dark matter has faced several important theoretical challenges, and it may be that dark matter is a non-existent “stuff” after all. The fences must be moved further out again for matter, while we wait to see what fate awaits the dark matter. It may ultimately dissipate into legend, as has the atmospheric ether of the 18th century chemistry.

Unlike pure philosophy, science cannot hide behind intricate and often beautiful syntactical structures. Scientists cannot claim that something exists “because,” or because a wonderful argument devoid of facts makes it sound probable. It is like the old cliché that asks “if you’ve never seen a ghost, how do you know there is no such thing?” We could easily concoct logically sound propositions that would philosophically allow the existence of ghosts, and in the eyes of many people such arguments would constitute proof. Alas, in science we do not allow the overwhelming preponderance of unsubstantiated claims serve in lieu of proof. It is an important concept to grasp that science cannot, in fact, disprove anything because the absence of evidence is not evidence. The fact that I have never seen a ghost (or, more correctly, I have never knowingly seen a ghost) cannot serve as evidence that ghosts do not exist. I have never knowingly seen the galaxy Andromeda, the nucleus of an atom, or Abraham Lincoln either, but a wealth of material data supports the proposition that all have reality and exist (in Lincoln’s case within a specific time frame in the 19th century).

Let me offer another example of what I mean when I say that scientists do not accept the absence of evidence as evidence of absence. If we consider snakes as animals without legs while doing an evaluation of their relationships with other organisms, we would incorrectly be able to ally them with legless lizards (there are scores of such creatures), caecilians (limbless amphibians) and, depending on the other criteria used, some fishes. In fact, snakes are derived from limbed lizards and their prehistoric ancestors once had limbs. Evidence is seen today in the spurs—remnants of the leg bones—in pythons, boas, and a few other ancestral snakes. More recently, evidence has surfaced in the form of fossil snakes with well-developed limbs. Proper evaluation should not see snakes as reptiles without legs (= absence of evidence), but as lizards that had legs and then, in evolutionary development, lost them. Snakes will then be properly allied with the lizard lineage from which they came (most probably the monitor group, in which no living member has any trace of limb reduction or loss).

People who desperately seek to affirm that some belief or wild practice is substantiated by science have led to far too many claims that just because we don’t know something it doesn’t mean that the something doesn’t exist. Astrology fans are particularly fond of claiming their fortune telling is a science—after all, it ends in
“-ology!” So many things in history have been predicted by the stars, they claim, so it simply must be science. Their claim ignores the fact that statistically the number of fortunes told that actually come true is tiny, many of those being based on such broad claims that it would be hard not to have them come true. If I am told that I shall meet a tall dark stranger, I can rest assured that, eventually, I shall indeed meet such a person. In any given week I think I encounter about a dozen such people, and of both sexes. Such eventualities have absolutely nothing to do with science: I might as well be told that I shall inhale and exhale today. More impressive, and possibly worthy of serious study, would be the astrological prediction that I shall not encounter any tall dark people!

If fortune telling were an actual science, it would need to be reproducible in its results. Let me give an example. If I mix two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, I shall form the compound known as water. The mixing will always produce water and only produce water, whether I do the lab work at the University of London, in the New Mexico desert, at Antarctica (where it might quickly turn into hard water, called ice), or on Mars; it will always happen whether the first caveman did it a million years ago, or a sorcerer working for the pharaoh Cheops, a college sophomore in a chemistry class, or down in my basement lab in the year 2020. The results are absolutely predictable, consistent, and repeatable. The mixture, of just hydrogen and oxygen, will never produce carbon dioxide, or vanilla ice cream, or kryptonite. In stark contrast, if I go to four fortunetellers using the same method of divination, whether reading the stars or casting cards, I shall inevitable get four different readings. In fact, I did this once at a Renaissance Fair. In four sequential star chart readings on the same day I was told that a) I was going to soon be a brilliant light in my chosen field (the reader did not define “soon” or tell me what my field was), b) I would soon meet the woman who would bear me three fine sons (I was already married happily to the woman who, like me, did not want to raise a family; and why is the prediction always for “fine” sons?), c) my health was soon to fail and make me weak and limited in activity (I contracted a 2-month bout of pneumonia 11 years later, but was fine before, and have been fine since), and finally d) I had once been the original architect of the Roman aqueducts and would again be known for my buildings (at least I wasn’t Julius Caesar!). This alone tells me that the method is not scientific, else all the readings should have been at least very similar. In fact, nothing predicted was valid except, perhaps, that I had been a Roman architect, but as there is no way to test that hypothesis it must remain no more than an interesting tale. The same goes for card readings: if I ask the reader the same question on the same day, the cards should always turn up the same. Not surprisingly different cards come up with each attempt to answer precisely the same question. I was told that the cards “don’t like” repeating themselves, so I’d only get one true reading per day. In this explanation the fortuneteller has brought us full circle back to religious belief. Whatever else one chooses to call fortune telling and occult practices, they are not sciences. That is not to say they are not providing a service or reflecting some level of realty, though both remain to be seen, but simply that they are not following scientific rigor and protocols. At least, I ask, let them be honest and stop claiming to be what they most definitely are not.

Science seeks to answer three types of questions, often sequentially. First, what’s out there? What are the things in the world and the parts of which they are made? Second, how do they work? Finally, why do things work the way they do? Back to the example of lightning, we might first have asked, “What is that stuff?” and sought some tentative solutions. Our early possible answers became our hypotheses. Hypotheses, we get taught in school, are “educated guesses.” I do not know where the guesses were educated and, from responses I get from high school and college students when I press for details, neither does anyone else. The intent of the definition was to elevate us scientists into “great thinkers,” such that when we made a guess it required an exalted name. In fact, any guess, educated or not, is a hypothesis. If Fred tells Barney that lightning is an electrical discharge between charged particles in clouds and the ground, his guess is a hypothesis. So is Barney’s counter, though, that it is a weapon spouted from a demonic pterodactyl. Given limited knowledge, limited ability to test answers, and the fact that both answers would account for the phenomenon, both guesses are hypotheses. Only testing and evaluation will ultimately demonstrate that Fred’s hypothesis is more robust than Barney’s.

Once we have some grasp on what lightning is we might logically ask how lightning works. We would need to learn about electricity, ions (which are charged atoms), atoms, conductivity, and discharge. Then we’d need to understand how these processes work at the incredibly large scale of a lightning bolt. We’d also need to learn about how lightning is generated in some types of cloud conditions but not others.

Finally getting a good theoretical grasp of the nature of lightning, we might then be able to tackle the question of why it functions as it does. Why are there a few big bolts during storms, instead of lots of small bolts on clear cloudless days? Why does it tend to strike lone standing objects on golf courses more readily than particular cars in a parking lot? We need the answers from the first two question sets of “what” and “how” before we can adequately understand “why.” This sequential business of data acquisition based on facts is the heart of science. In simpler terms we see the process rendered as “the” scientific method, though in reality “the” method is pretty variable.

But above all, science accumulates facts and seeks to compile answers without recourse to the supernatural. At whatever point we are tempted to say, “well, I can’t take this any further, so it must be God that does X,” we have stopped doing science. God, or gods, represents something that can, according to beliefs, alter the laws of physics. In that single ability, gods are thus supernatural, outside any attempt of scientists to collect any empirical, objective evidence. That which remains unknowable (as distinct from unknown) is beyond the scope and intent of science. Once we invoke God, gods, spirits, or other anthropomorphic non-material entities, we have departed the realm of science and jumped squarely into the world of theology.

Let me now summarize the basic principles that outline science once more:

1. Reality as we perceive it is real, at least in so far as it is the only reality to which we have access;
2. Reality can be experienced, observed, and measured within four knowable dimensions called length, width, height (or depth) and time;
3. Inferences about reality are made by observation, testing, and testable predictions. The more of these data we can accumulate, the greater our confidence in claiming “this is real and this is how it works”;
4. We do not accept the absence of evidence as evidence of absence, thus science does not work to disprove perceptions, but to narrow down the most likely possibility or explanation for phenomena within our reality; and
5. Explanations about reality may not invoke supernatural causes, no matter how tempting.
Ergo, science is a process that uses empirical data to make databased statements about the nature and workings of the knowable universe. Any deviation from these parameters leads you to a field that is not science, period.

Science advances only in terms of the questions it is able to ask, and the ability to adequately seek answers. No one asked how great was the orbit of the earth around the sun when it was believed that the earth was flat and the center of the universe. But once Nicolaus Copernicus presented his heliocentric (“sun in the center”) model of the solar system, the once unthinkable question could finally be asked. Of course, the Copernican model was such a drastic departure from the Catholic position of the time that the astronomer arranged for his great work to be published posthumously, so he’d suffer no earthly retribution by church authorities.
His intellectual successor, Galileo, was not so careful, and he suffered abuse and house arrest as a result of his publications. We here see the other way in which a question is not asked, namely because questioning a dogmatic position is forbidden by the governmental powers in charge. Galileo was able to ask questions about orbits because Copernicus demonstrated that orbits existed; but he and other inquiring minds were then forbidden to follow up on that knowledge. The more dictatorial the government, the less open it is to inquiries of any kind, least of all those that might challenge the philosophical foundations of the power structure.

The other type of limitation is based largely on technology. Many aspects of astronomy could not be answered without recourse to far better telescopes than the kind available to Galileo and his contemporaries. In turn, we needed radio telescopes to even learn about, let alone study, neutron stars, pulsars, and quasars. Darwin could not explain inheritance because the gene and its function were not discovered and understood until some quarter-century after his death. Without knowledge of genes, the mechanisms of inheritance could not be adequately addressed. It is with improve access to materials, better ways of studying those materials, and improved ways of conducting analyses of our observations that science progresses. By its very nature, science is a discipline firmly wedded to modification, change, and, sometimes, outright replacement of its ideas. The nebulous nature of science is difficult for many people to grasp precisely because the way they learned science in school was in the same “here are the facts” mode used for history and English classes. No wonder we have a scientifically illiterate society, when the most fundamental characteristics of science are typically explained only to graduate school science students!

Dr. Sprackland has been teaching anatomy, physiology, and biology for over twenty-five years, and is the author of several books and scores of articles about science and science education. His next book, "Giant Lizards, Second Edition," is due for publication in January 2009.