History and etymology

Main article: History of sciences

Personification of "Science" in front of theBoston Public Liabrary

While empirical investigations of the natural world have been described since antiquity (for example, by Aristotle, Thophrastus and Pliny theElder, and scientific methods have been employed since the Middle Ages (for example, by Ibn al-Haytham, Abu Rayhan Biruni and Roger Bacon), the dawn of modern science is generally traced back to the early modern period during what is known as the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.^[5]

The word "science" comes through the Old French, and is derived in turn from the Latin scientia, "knowledge", the nominal form of the verb scire, "to know". The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root that yields scire is *skei-, meaning to "cut, separate, or discern".^[6] Similarly, the Greek word for science is 'επιστήμη', deriving from the verb 'επίσταμαι', 'to know'. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, science or scientia meant any systematic recorded knowledge.^[7] Science therefore had the same sort of very broad meaning that philosophy had at that time. In other languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, the word corresponding to science also carries this meaning.

Prior to the 1700s, the preferred term for the study of nature was natural philosophy, while English speakers most typically referred to other philosophical disciplines (such as logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics) as moral philosophy. Today, "moral philosophy" is more-or-less synonymous with "ethics". Far into the 1700s, science and natural philosophy were not quite synonymous, but only became so later with the direct use of what would become known formally as the scientific method. By contrast, the word "science" in English was still used in the 17th century (1600s) to refer to the Aristotelian concept of knowledge which was secure enough to be used as a sure prescription for exactly how to do something. In this differing sense of the two words, the philosopher John Locke wrote disparagingly in 1690 that "natural philosophy [the study of nature] is not capable of being made a science".

Basic classifications

Scientific fields are commonly divided into two major groups:natural sciences, which study natural phenomena (including biologiccal life), and social sciences, which study human behavior and socities. These groupings areempirical sciences, which means the knowledge must be based on observable phenomena and capable of being tested for its validity by other researchers working under the same conditions. There are also related disciplines that are grouped into interdisciplinary and applied sciences, such as engineering and health science. Within these categories are specialized scientific fields that can include elements of other scientific disciplines but often possess their own terminology and body of expertise.
Mathematics, which is classified as a formal science, has both similarities and differences with the natural and social sciences. It is similar to empirical sciences in that it involves an objective, careful and systematic study of an area of knowledge; it is different because of its method of verifying its knowledge, usinga prior rather than empirical methods. Formal science, which also includes statistics and logic, is vital to the empirical sciences. Major advances in formal science have often led to major advances in the empirical sciences. The formal sciences are essential in the formation of hypotheses, theories, andlaws, both in discovering and describing how things work (natural sciences) and how people think and act (social sciences).

Science

Science (from the latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is comprehensive information on any subject, but the word is especially used for information about the physical universe. As knowledge has increased, some methods have proved more reliable than others, and today the scientific method is the standard for science. It includes the use of careful observation, experiment, measurements, mathematics, and replication -- to be considered a science, a body of knowledge must stand up to repeated testing by independent observers. The use of the scientific method to make new discoveries is called scientific reasearch, and the people who carry out this research are called scientists. This article focuses on science in the more restricted sense, what is sometimes called experimental science. Applied science, or engineering, is the practical application of scientific knowledge.

A scientific hypothesis is an educated guess about the nature of the universe, a scientific theory is a hypothesis which has been confirmed by repeated observation and measurement. Scientific theories are usually given mathematical form, and are always subject to refutation if future experiments contradict them.

In the modern world, scientific research is a major activity in all developed nations, and scientists are expected to publish their discoveries in refereed journals, scientific periodicals where referees check the facts in an article before it is published. Even after publication, new scientific ideas are not generally accepted until the work has been replicated.

Scientific literacy is the ability of the general population to understand the basic concepts related to science.