What IS Science, Exactly?
(7 minute read)
Good question. Science is a word that gets used a lot, but we don’t often think about what it means. I’m going to break it down into three parts.[1] The word science can refer to either:
a process,
a body of knowledge, or
a set of institutions.
Here’s what I mean by each of those things.
The process of science
The heart of “doing science” is all about making observations and taking notes. That’s it. That’s the simplest version of what science is. Making observations means you look at something, or you listen to something, or you measure something; you observe what is happening in a particular situation. And then—this is important—you write it down. Keeping a record is crucial. We have to be able to look back years later and see how someone got their data to determine whether the information is reliable or not.
Most scientists will pick a question that they want to answer. Like, why does this thing happen? Or how does it happen? Or what makes this species different from that one? Or, I wonder if I could create a new material that behaves this particular way? And then, they’ll go to the field or the lab or the computer and try to poke at the question. They’ll dig to the bottom of what’s really going on. This might involve taking lots of detailed measurements or using specialized equipment. It might involve doing the same thing many times but slightly tweaking it so they can see what happens when they change a particular variable.
This process can involve a lot of trial and error. Maybe your experiments don’t go well the first time, maybe you have to change your strategy or you realize that you’re testing the wrong thing. There is no one scientific method, contrary to what you learned in school. Instead, research is all about using any tools at your disposal to learn more about the thing you’re studying until you can assemble the whole picture. It’s kind of like doing a puzzle. In the dark. When you don’t have all the pieces.
Once a scientist reaches a point where they think they have a grasp on what’s going on, they will write up what they found. They’ll put it in a document, which they will then put out into “the literature” for other scientists to evaluate.
This happens in two stages. First, the document has to be evaluated by at least two independent experts in the same field. This part is called peer review. The reviewers will make a recommendation to the journal (a.k.a. scientific publication). They will say either: yes, this meets scientific standards and should be published, or no, this work doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and should not be published. Or maybe it should be published but with some changes.
That first stage, the peer review process, is the bar that a scientist has to clear to get their work out there into the scientific community. Then, once the journal publishes it, now any scientist in the field can read it and evaluate it. And, when lots of scientists read lots of different journal articles on the particular research topic that they care about, they’ll start to notice emerging patterns or trends. And then when they go to scientific conferences, they’ll discuss these patterns and trends with other scientists. This is the second stage of getting the work out into the scientific community.
. . .
Let’s recap. The process of science involves first: making observations and taking notes. That’s key. Then, after a scientist has built up enough evidence to say they know what’s going on in a particular experiment or situation, they will write it up and put it into the literature. The document they write has to be checked by independent evaluators (the peer reviewers). Then if it clears that hurdle, it can be published and read by all scientists in the field.
The body of knowledge
When we ask, “What does the science say about ___?” we’re talking about this mountain of facts that comes from the scientific process. This body of knowledge is created and refined by scientists publishing their findings in the literature and discussing the results. The literature refers to all the peer-reviewed publications out there. This is how shiny new findings from cutting-edge research are announced to the scientific community. But new findings are not immediately accepted as truth. Other scientists might question the results, leading to debate and attempts to disprove each other. They’ll do more experiments, and eventually the evidence will add up one way or the other. The ideas that survive the test of time and critique are the ideas the scientific community will come to accept as true.
There are so many scientists all around the world doing similar work that they can check each other. So it’s never just one person’s word on what is true or not. It’s the whole community’s consensus on what is true or not.
One thing that many non-scientists don’t understand is that a scientist will never say they are 100% certain, no matter how strongly they think they are right. And that’s good. A scientist should never be 100% certain about anything. Because history has shown that even when we are pretty sure we have the truth, there are always more layers of understanding.
The body of knowledge is constantly being added to and refined. It’s never done. And this is the really beautiful thing about science. You start with a question, you do some digging, and maybe you answer it. But often in the process, you uncover more questions than what you started with. And so we keep digging, because there is always more to discover. Progressively, we keep improving our current knowledge to get closer and closer to real truth.
. . .
So now we’ve talked about the process of science and how we build up the body of knowledge. From here on out when I talk about the body of knowledge, I mean the things that are generally accepted to be true by the scientific community. The stuff of textbooks, not necessarily the new stuff that’s hot off the press. New findings can be fun and exciting, but they need to be debated and confirmed by more evidence before they can become part of our mountain of truth.
The set of institutions
Scientific research mostly happens at three types of places: universities, government-owned laboratories, and companies who sell products that rely on new technologies. So generally, if somebody wants to be a scientist, they would end up working for one of those three places. However, you don’t have to actually be a scientist to participate in the work of science. There are lots of organizations that have so-called citizen science projects. They encourage regular people – no science degree required – to make observations and record them in a database. It’s like crowd-sourced research.[2]
The institutions of science do not stop at just the people who do research. It also includes the people who communicate research. That includes publications for scientists, like the peer-reviewed journals that I mentioned. But we also have non-technical publications that can be read and understood by anybody, like magazines and newspapers. The work of communicating science also involves schools (the places where everybody gets their basic science education) and museums (where regular people can go to be inspired and fascinated by science).
. . .
In summary:
Science can mean: a process, a body of knowledge, or a set of institutions. “Doing science” is the process of making observations, taking notes, and then sharing your results with the scientific community so they can be evaluated and integrated into the body of knowledge. The body of knowledge refers to all the facts and theories that have been collected and agreed upon by the scientific community, having stood the test of time and debate. And the set of institutions means the people and organizations who do research (universities, government labs, private companies), and also the groups that communicate research (publications, museums, and schools).
I hope this clears things up.
[1] I borrowed this framework from a talk I attended at a virtual conference:
Lewenstein, B. V. What is public engagement in science? Presented at Communicating the Future: Engaging the Public in Basic Science, online, July 27-28, 2021. (https://SciPEP.org/events)
[2] If this sparks your interest, look up https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience for examples. Or if there are any specific research organizations you are interested in, check their websites to see if they have projects you can participate in.
