What makes science unique

This system is facilitated by diversity within the scientific community, which offers a broad range of perspectives on scientific ideas. In fact: Science affects your life everyday in all sorts of different ways. Science can be fun and is accessible to everyone. You can apply an understanding of how science works to your everyday life. Science doesn't just take place in laboratories.

You can have fun with and make use of science in everyday life. Demonstrating the predictive power of a theory does not necessarily require the prediction of events in the future.

The predictions may be about evidence from the past that has not yet been found or studied. A theory about the origins of human beings, for example, can be tested by new discoveries of human-like fossil remains. This approach is clearly necessary for reconstructing the events in the history of the earth or of the life forms on it. It is also necessary for the study of processes that usually occur very slowly, such as the building of mountains or the aging of stars.

Stars, for example, evolve more slowly than we can usually observe. Theories of the evolution of stars, however, may predict unsuspected relationships between features of starlight that can then be sought in existing collections of data about stars.

When faced with a claim that something is true, scientists respond by asking what evidence supports it. But scientific evidence can be biased in how the data are interpreted, in the recording or reporting of the data, or even in the choice of what data to consider in the first place.

Scientists' nationality, sex, ethnic origin, age, political convictions, and so on may incline them to look for or emphasize one or another kind of evidence or interpretation. Not until female scientists entered the field was the importance of female primates' community-building behavior recognized. Bias attributable to the investigator, the sample, the method, or the instrument may not be completely avoidable in every instance, but scientists want to know the possible sources of bias and how bias is likely to influence evidence.

Scientists want, and are expected, to be as alert to possible bias in their own work as in that of other scientists, although such objectivity is not always achieved. One safeguard against undetected bias in an area of study is to have many different investigators or groups of investigators working in it. It is appropriate in science, as elsewhere, to turn to knowledgeable sources of information and opinion, usually people who specialize in relevant disciplines.

But esteemed authorities have been wrong many times in the history of science. In the long run, no scientist, however famous or highly placed, is empowered to decide for other scientists what is true, for none are believed by other scientists to have special access to the truth.

There are no preestablished conclusions that scientists must reach on the basis of their investigations. In the short run, new ideas that do not mesh well with mainstream ideas may encounter vigorous criticism, and scientists investigating such ideas may have difficulty obtaining support for their research.

Indeed, challenges to new ideas are the legitimate business of science in building valid knowledge. Even the most prestigious scientists have occasionally refused to accept new theories despite there being enough accumulated evidence to convince others. In the long run, however, theories are judged by their results: When someone comes up with a new or improved version that explains more phenomena or answers more important questions than the previous version, the new one eventually takes its place.

Science as an enterprise has individual, social, and institutional dimensions. Scientific activity is one of the main features of the contemporary world and, perhaps more than any other, distinguishes our times from earlier centuries.

Scientific work involves many individuals doing many different kinds of work and goes on to some degree in all nations of the world. Men and women of all ethnic and national backgrounds participate in science and its applications. As a social activity, science inevitably reflects social values and viewpoints. Before the twentieth century, and well into it, women and people of color were essentially excluded from most of science by restrictions on their education and employment opportunities; the remarkable few who overcame those obstacles were even then likely to have their work belittled by the science establishment.

The direction of scientific research is affected by informal influences within the culture of science itself, such as prevailing opinion on what questions are most interesting or what methods of investigation are most likely to be fruitful.

Elaborate processes involving scientists themselves have been developed to decide which research proposals receive funding, and committees of scientists regularly review progress in various disciplines to recommend general priorities for funding. Science goes on in many different settings. Scientists are employed by universities, hospitals, business and industry, government, independent research organizations, and scientific associations. They may work alone, in small groups, or as members of large research teams.

Their places of work include classrooms, offices, laboratories, and natural field settings from space to the bottom of the sea. Because of the social nature of science, the dissemination of scientific information is crucial to its progress. Some scientists present their findings and theories in papers that are delivered at meetings or published in scientific journals. Those papers enable scientists to inform others about their work, to expose their ideas to criticism by other scientists, and, of course, to stay abreast of scientific developments around the world.

The advancement of information science knowledge of the nature of information and its manipulation and the development of information technologies especially computer systems affect all sciences. Those technologies speed up data collection, compilation, and analysis; make new kinds of analysis practical; and shorten the time between discovery and application. Organizationally, science can be thought of as the collection of all of the different scientific fields, or content disciplines.

Rationalistic - within the school of rationalism knowledge can be derived from the rules of logic and without reference to the empirical world. Reliability - Is the research study repeatable? If I go back and repeat the measurements in the same conditions will I get the same results?

Replication - This refers to the idea that the procedures methodology employed in the study are reported in sufficient detail that a second researcher could repeat the study. Validity - This concerns the integrity of conclusions that are generated through a research study. There are a number of issues raised here including 1 does the measure employed accurately reflect the concept under investigation; 2 is the causal relationship robust - can we be sure that X is the cause of Y?

Data are then gathered and analyzed before conclusions and interpretations are made. However, while this path is typically followed to build knowledge, there are other routes such as observational studies that seek to isolate patterns from large data sets, rather than imply cause-effect relationships supported by data derived from controlled experiments. Science can be thought of as a discipline that requires a degree of evidence to build knowledge around phenomena, but it also blends logic with imagination.

As a result, science is dynamic and creative, and scientists often disagree about experimental designs, results analyses and interpretations. Although scientists typically follow the scientific method of inquiry, there are many different objective and unbiased ways to do this for any given experiment, and we rarely know which is the best. Furthermore, the vast majority of conclusions are based on measures of probability; researchers decide on a level of uncertainty that they are happy to accept before concluding one way or another what their data show.

The above point about science being uncertain based on probability is very important because general audiences may hold the misconception that science is about proof, and that scientists perform experiments to prove hypotheses or theories as though they were mathematical equations, which they rarely are especially in biology where variation is seen everywhere.

You must take care when communicating to such audiences to explain the uncertainty attached to what you are saying see our dedicated resource here. Additionally, science is a discipline that uses a lot of technical jargon, to the extent that astronomers might not understand what chemists or evolutionary biologists are talking about when they are using terms that are well known in their own circles.