Science as a distinct branch of philosophy began a long time ago. How long it is hard to say, but, certainly, its roots were in place with the Ancient Greeks, and it may well have begun long before that.
Today, science is usually thought of as its own "thing", with knowledge and tools that are not directly related to any other branch of human thought. In fact, it is often seen as conflicting with other schools of human thought, especially religion. The media are particularly fond of science, reporting on its latest conclusions even though the reporters are often not scientifically trained and cannot critically assess the information on which they are reporting. That inability does not prevent them from telling you and I what foods we should eat, which chemicals will make us die earlier, and what new miracles may be around the bend. Of course, if you are not yourself a trained scientist, then you have no real way of assessing the "scientific" information given to you, either. Thus, you may run about being worried about margarine, only to later be worried about trans fats and anal leakage caused by olestra. In another decade or so, you'll be worried about the next butter substitute and the horrific things it can do to you. The point here is that there is a lot of scientific conclusions running amok with few people actually trying to make sense of it all.
At a deeper level, scientific conclusions have some very interesting things to tell us about ourselves and our reality, if we are willing to listen. If we are wise scientific consumers, we must take these conclusions with a grain of salt, which is a theme that will be repeated over and over again in this blog. However, with a healthy dose of skepticism, we can then look at what these things tell us and draw our own conclusions about what they mean. It is this for this purpose first and foremost that I have created this blog. I hope to relay very complicated scientific concepts in an easily accessed manner and offer my interpretations as to their meaning, all the while leaving you, gentle reader, to decide for yourself what it means, if anything.
For those that could use a refresher, science is not really a body of knowledge, but a process unto itself. The process is as follows: observe, hypothesize, test, evaluate, repeat. If we test enough times a given hypothesis, it becomes a theory, and, after enough positive tests, a law (possibly). It can take only one test that gives results inconsistent with the whole theory to bring it down. Indeed, Einstein dismantled the aether explanation of electrodynamics without a test at all. He only had to publish a better explanation that took into account already existing explanations. Tests performed later by other people verified the validity of relativity theory. The scientific process (or method), then, results in conclusions that we have to evaluate as seeming to align with our reality or not. This last part is where the fun is, and it is where I am going to be concentrating. Before I do, though, my first critical post (in the true sense of word - rather than meaning that it will be "negative") will be on the assumptions underlying the scientific method - one key one in particular.
We need to understand the potential holes in the scientific process before we can examine any of its conclusions, and that, really, is what the philosophy of science is all about.
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