Science is fascinating for anybody who values knowledge, because it is a body of knowledge as well as a method to acquire more knowledge. Indeed the word science is derived from the Latin word scire, meaning, “to know.” Science is dynamic, which means it is constantly developing, the science today is not exactly the same as it was, say, fifty years ago. This is so because scientists are always on the look out for new knowledge.
To gather new knowledge, scientists have to constantly ask questions, starting with What, Why, When, Where and How. Asking such questions is curiosity. You must be curious too, all children of your age are. But in science there is a particular way to answer such questions.
As you will proceed through the science taught in your school you will discover that certain words like energy, force, cells, charge, etc. are used very frequently. Such words are the concepts of science. A concept is an abstract, universal idea, notion, or entity that serves to designate a category or class of entities, events, or relations. For example, God is a
concept, so is length or height. Concepts like substances; animals; plants; food; electricity; information; communication; sky; universe etc. make science possible.
Concepts help us to explain phenomenon. It may be a strange word, for some readers of this article, but it is important to know its meaning because it is central to all science and technology. A phenomenon (plural: phenomena) is an observable event. Phenomena constitute the world as we experience it, as opposed to the world as it exists independently of our experiences (thing-in-themselves. Phenomena make up the raw data of science. It was an attempt to explain
phenomena like: seasons, earthquakes, lightening, rain, fire, sunrise, thunderstorm, rusting, blooming of plants, similarities between parent and offspring (heredity) etc. etc. that lead to the development of science.
How do we know that what we see, hear or sense is a phenomenon? We say it is phenomenon if it can be observed by almost everybody. The word
observation is familiar to most science students. Textbooks and teachers of science often use it. Observation is an activity of an intelligent living being, to sense and assimilate the knowledge of a phenomenon in its framework of previous knowledge and ideas. Seeing, listening, feeling the happenings around carefully is observing. In science observation is an important activity, because science attempts to explain observations made by people.
To gather new knowledge, scientists follow a certain method known as the scientific method. Most of the common observations and phenomena can indeed be satisfactorily explained by using the known concepts, theories, hypothesis and laws of science.
You must be aware of The Newton’s law of gravitation, and perhaps, the law of conservation of energy or law of constant proportions. What is common between these laws? Are they any different from the civil laws and criminal laws?
A scientific explanation does not use a motivating agent, such as God, most often it is through a mathematical relationship between several observable quantities. A law in science summarizes observed experimental facts—it does not explain the facts. Scientific laws, are built on concepts, hypotheses, and experiments. They are as trustworthy as the concepts of science and as complete and accurate as the experiments on which they are based. Since human beings formulate scientific laws, they are neither eternally true nor unchangeable, like the divine laws. In fact with the advance of knowledge and experience, many laws of science prove, sooner or later, to be too limited or too inaccurate. An example is the law of conservation of mass, which today we recognize as having only limited applicability.
Thus to explain any observation or phenomena, scientists take recourse to the known laws of science, or hypothesis and theories.
In most cases, most observations extend what is currently accepted, providing further evidence that existing ideas are correct. For example, in 1676 the English physicist Robert Hooke discovered that elastic objects, such as metal springs, stretch in proportion to the force that acts on them. Despite all the advances that have been made in physics since 1676, this simple law still holds true. Similarly, all physical laws are based on 25 fundamental constants; prominent scientists have wondered whether these constants have remained constant ever since the eternity. They have studied emissions from very remote objects, so remote that the light emitted from them takes several million years to reach us. They have recently concluded that there is no reason to doubt that a particular constant, called alpha, has changed its value for the past 10,000 million years. But, this need not be always true, sometimes, an observation or a phenomena cannot be explained by the either existing laws of science, or any known theories. In such a case scientists advance new theories. If a theory is found useful to explain all such observations in general, it becomes a law.
Thus you can see that scientists are in a constant pursuit, of knowledge, to discover new laws or substances. That is the indeed the fascination of science!
