My Science Essay

What does the word science mean?

How do we define science? Well we could start saying that the word

science comes from the Latin “scientia,” meaning knowledge. According to different dictionaries, the definition of science is "knowledge attained through study or practice," or "knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, experience as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world."

What does that really mean? Science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge. This system uses observation and experimentation to describe and explain natural phenomena. The term science also refers to the organized body of knowledge people have gained using that system. Less formally, the word science often describes any systematic field of study or the knowledge gained from it.

What is the purpose of science? Science is an intellectual activity carried on by humans that is designed to discover information about the natural world in which humans live and to discover the ways in which this information can be organized into meaningful patterns. A primary aim of science is to collect facts (data). An ultimate purpose of science is to discern the order that exists between and among the various facts.

How did Science develop historically?

The historical beginning of science is undetermined. It is stated that

its appearance was placed at the moment “where someone discovers the

relationship between phenomenon ones are the “cause” and the others are the “effect””.

The knowledge named science arises as a rational occupation, which has tried to decipher principles and laws in nature, from the plurality of objects, its regularity and the cyclic movement of nature itself.

Towards the VI century, before our age, in the ancient Greece, which is known today as Asia Minor, a group of distinguished thinkers came up, who were capable of looking for natural-rational answers to the questions that for centuries diverse human groups had answered by means of supernatural entities in the context of mythical-religious

thought. These thinkers were the Ionians and their intellectual inheritors.

The first Greek thinkers were at the same time philosophers and scientists, who were capable of theorizing, experimenting and looking for applications of their knowledge. In the context of a wide flow of trade, both of goods and ideas, new talents appear such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Anaxagoras, among others. They were able to transgress the mythical-religious explanations of the time.

The cosmos was not created by an Almighty God, for Thales it came from the water, basic element. From Anaximenes it came from the wind. For Anaximander it was not a God, it was an unknown substance, like a chaos originated from undifferentiated elements. Pythagoras and his disciples went for a rational principal to explain the constitutive elements of the cosmos: the integers, basic idea of explaining the

nature by the means of mathematics. Empedocles would say that the cosmos is a product of different interchanges of the four elements: water, earth, fire and wind. This is the basic idea of the chemistry because at the present time there are not four elements but 108. Democritus sustained that nature was constituted by a few last invisible principles: the atoms which is the fundamental idea of current science. The big jump given by these Greek thinkers named physiologists or cosmologists does not have any precedents because it is a big step for humanity which starts to take off the religious

vestments to find some explanations about natural phenomena.

The most interesting case is the one that starts with Thales in the year 585. Thales was capable of predicting the total solar eclipse that took place on this date in Asia Minor. Instead of getting upset he was capable of predicting it accurately. The most interesting part of all of this was the consequences, generated by the prediction, to

the thought at that specific time. How could Thales being a simple mortal from Miletus, where the Sun and the Moon had a divine supernatural character and the status of gods, predict the solar eclipse? This would mean that Thales was capable of giving orders to the gods or that the eclipse did not obey divine plans from the gods and that the eclipse is governed by mechanicals, explicable and predictable laws.

Between the VI and IV centuries before our age, the Greek science had amazing results. For Aristotle science stated judgements on the reality therefore its statements were necessary. To explain how science gets to true conclusions, Aristotle systematizes a deductive logic from syllogisms with necessary affirmations form general to particular. Aristotle’s syllogism will be the fundamental tool to validate

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