Is Science Progressive?

One way of describing science may be that it seems to explain the universe, seems being the operative word. Science has always been a way of defining and explaining phenomena that we can and cannot see. For example, the way that a pencil falls to the ground when someone lets it go out of their hand. Or the way a magnet sticks to metal through magnetism. You see, science not only explains and defines these occurrences though, it uses a procedure called the scientific method. This method includes a series of steps to test a phenomenon with a certain hypothesis that will either be proved or disproved in the end. In addition to experimentation, conclusions that are later made into theories are only really accepted once the scientific community accepts it. They go through methods of triangulation that can either approve or disprove the validity of an experiment and later, if all goes well, it may be turned into scientific knowledge. However, scientific knowledge may not be knowledge at all. What I mean by this is that science is all based off of things that we think is true. Although scientific theories have been tested, re-tested, re-tested again until it is actually made a theory, there is nothing that really says that the knowledge is a fact. It is simply something that we hold to be true about the world. Take for example gravity, although I assume the majority of humankind "believes" in gravity, it is still only a theory. A thousand years from now we could find out that it is not the attraction of masses or whatnot that makes objects fall to the ground and keeps people suspended on the ground. In this case, scientific paradigm crisis will arise meaning that all of the scientific laws, quantities, formulas, theorems, and even theories that are based on the definition and function of gravity would be wrong. That brings me back to the prompt, is science really progressive. Have we been making and finding scientific discoveries all these years, creating developed societies with more efficient medicines and better understanding of the world? Or have we been basing everything we know after false knowledge?

Furthermore, I would like to take on the question, can science progress? One of the most important ways that science helps the development of our society is the truths that it uncovers about our universe. It is so crucial because of human's natural desire to know and understand the world around them. However, as I mentioned earlier, there are no facts in science, only theories that we think are true. That being said, Popper's falsifiability proposes that there can be scientific truths if a hypothesis cannot be disproved. This means that if I drop the pen, it will fall to the ground. But, this means that hypotheses must be very specific. For instance, what happens if I am floating on the Moon and drop a pen or happen to be swimming in the ocean. Specificity is crucial to defining hypotheses that are always supposed to be proven correct. Popper also adds that hypotheses that cannot be proved or disproved, like faith for example, cannot be considered scientific knowledge. Although not all scientific phenomena can be recreated in lab or field experiments, it is important that there is some sort of evidence in order to create a credent hypothesis.

Once hypotheses are are not disproven, based on a significant amount of evidence and experimentation, scientific theories can be created. Kuhn says that theories are part of scientific paradigms, an example or model of a great scientific achievement. This could be something like Einstein's theory of relativity or the example I used before, Newton's theory of gravity. Now within these paradigms, scientists can then use the information to solve problems. Therefore, new knowledge is created based off of the previously obtained knowledge and so forth. However, there is another aspect to Kuhn's research. He says that there may be anomalies in the paradigms that are created which cannot be ignored. One way we can see this happening is the way we classify animals in biology, for example, the kingdoms of animals such as mammals, reptiles, amphibians, etc. Each type of animal has a set of rules that are part of each paradigm, for example, mammals have live young, fur and are warm-blooded. However, there is an exception to this classification. Platypi are mammals that do not have live young, they lay eggs instead. The question is, why do we still classify them as mammals if they do not fit all of the rules of the paradigm? My guess is that since they fit the best with the mammal category, that is where they stay, but, they are still an anomaly because they do not have all of the components of mammals. As you can see, even scientific categorization is not perfect; although we have strict ways of classifying animals, new ones may be discovered that mess up the classification systems.

On the subject of animals, polar bears seem to be huge in the environmental science news nowadays. With the crisis of global warming becoming more of a reality, people are starting to become aware of the polar ice caps melting. However, global warming was not always a big deal in the world and many thought of climate change as just a silly myth that won't actually happen. Has science progressed in this area, well yes and no. One thing that science does really well is define concepts, theories and terms. Although climate change may only be a theory, something that has progressed over the years is the spread of information about this phenomenon and the awareness that is actually giving people the initiative to do something about it. One of the main sources of climate change, as said by scientists, is the hole in the Ozone layer that is getting larger every day because of fossil fuel emissions. The scientific community reports back frequently about the ways in which they are progressing in this field, finding new ways of reducing a carbon footprint or finding major causes of this fossil fuel emission. But what if scientists were wrong? What if all of this speculation and testing was not at all the cause of global warming. What if our universe were in a giant ball that a giant baby uses as a play toy. Of course that is quite a ridiculous theory, nevertheless, in this way, science is not progressive. Science can only build upon what is already known, once a theory is made, although it may be proven valid, it is not fact. Thus, all the knowledge that is created based on that theory is also non-factual, it just checks coherently back with the original, human synthesized knowledge.