What we nowadays call science is a specific practice that developed within a specific time and place,
that is, within, Europe beginning around 1500, that is, during Columbus's voyages. This was also,
I believe, around the time when a Polish fellow whose Latin name was Copernicus was taking up
in a serious way the study of astronomy, where he would in time make a name for himself.
So: what was this new thing? Any formulation draws debate. Sticking to a very abstract level, I think
one can say that science is a self-corrective process in which hypotheses are developed and
refined so that they can suggest experiment. (In the case of astronomy, since we can't haul planets
into a laboratory, 'experiment' has generally meant targeted observation.)
These experiments can then falsify some hypotheses, uphold others, and demand the refinement of
still others. Scientific peers seek to confirm each other’s results and build on each other's findings,
in a way that cumulatively builds an ever more accurate picture of the natural world and how humans
can successfully live within it.
This is as I've said, a quite abstract statement. It is also idealizing. When I describe science in such
terms, I make it out to be not just an Idea, but an ideal. Indeed, one worth dying for.
The black-and-white photo above is of Marie Curie, who embodied this ideal. Even the law
that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, one that seemed very well-founded (and indeed WAS
well-founded) before she took up her work on radium, soon came to be seen as in need of important
modification. The prestige of science has been earned the hard way. Curie died of aplastic anemia, that is,
of radiation poisoning.
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