Behold, Science: Part 1, Origins

     What do you imagine when you hear the word "science"? Perhaps to it conjures to mind images of a man with crazed hair and a lab coat looming over bubbling chemicals and building strange monsters. Or perhaps, you might recall something you've heard on the news about a recent study showing how your favorite food is bad for you (Actually, breathing too much oxygen will almost certainly give you cancer. Moderation is everything). Today I will write briefly regarding nature the origins of science.
     In its strictest sense science is a process and the philosophy build around it. It is a method for gathering knowledge and understanding about the world around us. This is why it's also called the scientific method. A "scientific solution" simply a solution developed from this process. Being a scientist means that you adhere to the process and, by consequence, philosophy of science. Fancy degrees are helpful should you seek to be a professional scientist, but they are not required to be a scientist.

     Science is not the only method of obtaining knowledge and understanding and it's certainly not the first. For thousands of years people from all over the globe have developed ways to understand and influence the world around them. We call them scientists today but they were not scientists by modern definitions. A more accurate label would be scholars. Notable scholars such as Archimedes,  Pythagoras, Hypatia and Hero of Alexandria, Shen Kuo, Liu Hui, Hassan Ibn Al-Haitham, Omar Khayyaam, Al-Khwarizmi are just a few of many whom contributed to proto-science. These indivuals made advances in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, navigation,and much more. Many of their methods for investingating the natural were later adopted into science.

     In the European Enlightenment Era of the 16th  and 17th centuries the old notions and teachings from Ancient Greece were called into question. Scholars such as Ole Roamer, Nicholas Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler began making observations and calculations of the night sky. From this information they were able to describe with detail the heavens like no one else before. Galileo Galilei continued this work with the then newly invented telescope. Not satisfied with astronomy he conducted experiments in mechanics as well. Their contributions along with the changing philosophical climate paved the way for modern science.

     Science as we know it today comes from the philosophies of of two men Rene Decartes and Francis Bacon. Both men sought to apply reason and logic to the study of the natural world. Decartes favored the philosophy of deduction which concerns itself with applying general ideas  to specific situations. Bacon felt that induction was a better method. Induction means you use facts gained from specific situations to form general conclusions. You might think of it as intuition verses experience. Both philosophies are used together in modern science. In fact, to this day scientists are usually grouped by theorist and experimentalists. It is this combination of philosophical reason and study of the natural world that is the essence of science.
    

     Part 2, The Scientific Method...