Science or should I go in to detail, Natural Science is one of the subjects that I am taking up as a Information Technology Student at the Ateneo de Davao University, yet my absences are all piling up once again just like they did during my high school years, but hey, let’s do something productive during this vacant time and head into a few pointers that could be made use of for me and probably a few others as their Preliminary Review in Natural Science, so, here are some basics that I know without the need to open my notes.
Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning “knowledge”) refers to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome.[1. WikiPedia]
From the statement that I have given above we can deduce that Science is a systematized body of knowledge. It requires to go through processes or steps that is also referred to as the Scientific Method. Even though Science can answer a lot of questions and issues rationally and provide reasonable feedback to a lot of things that have been happening around the globe, it do has its limitations which are (maybe) yet to be discovered.
Science might know a lot of things but one of the limitations it has is the origin of the humans, the start of life on earth and the creator himself who is named God our creator, from a religious point of view. Science and Religion do not always agree with each other and like emphasized in the movie Angels and Demons Science and Religion needs each other to understand the human better and our origin more detailed. They do not agree more since there has never been a scientific explanation about the existence of a God and as long as there won’t be any there will not be a single scientist who would agree that there is a God out there that has created all of us and the earth along with it.
The process/steps that I have mentioned above once again is called the scientific method wherein you have first to identify the problem, wherein that particular problem must be testable, achievable and something well-define, you need to be keen with your variables because others might interpret it as something totally different.
And just to give a random sample let’s analyze the following two issues that need to be solved.
One morning when I went to the garden and put pee on one of the flowers it started to bloom.
Do you understand the problem and can you identify the variables that are attached to it? Do you consider the question above a well define problem or not? Of course, it is not, because there are multiple strings that you can add to some of its variables like for example, the setting of the garden that morning, what kind of pee has been poured upon the flowers and what kind of flower has been peed on. A constructive problem that appears more properly defined would be
One morning when I went to the garden and put pee of my little baby son on one of the sun flowers it started to bloom.
Do you get the point now why it is very important to have the whole problem well defined before you engage into solving it? With just a single variable changed the whole experiment might have a total different outcome from what you are supposed to be come out with.
In our next Preliminary Review we’ll try to tackle Natural Science Basics once again and talk about the Variety of Organisms and their characteristics such as movement, reproduction and more.
