Science, Nature

Science in the broadest sense refers to any system of "objective" knowledge. In a more restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on the scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge humans have gained by such research. more...

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Fields of science are commonly classified along two major lines:

Natural sciences, which study natural phenomena; Social sciences, which study human behavior and societies;

Whether mathematics is a science or a tool of science is a controversial matter of perspective. It is similar to other disciplines in that it is a careful, systematic study of an area of knowledge — specifically, it focuses on a priori knowledge. Mathematics as a whole is vital to the sciences; indeed, major advances in mathematics have often led to critical advances in the physical and biological sciences. Certain mathematical approaches are indispensable for the formation of hypotheses, theories, and laws, both in discovering and describing how things work (natural sciences) and how people think and act (social sciences).

Science as defined above is sometimes termed pure science in order to differentiate it from applied science, the latter being the application of scientific research to specific human needs.

Scientific method

Scientists use models to refer to a description or depiction of something, specifically one which can be used to make predictions that can be tested by experiment or observation. A hypothesis is a contention that has been neither well supported nor yet ruled out by experiment. A theory, in the context of science, is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of certain natural phenomena. A theory typically describes the behavior of much broader sets of phenomena than a hypothesis — commonly, a large number of hypotheses may be logically bound together by a single theory. A physical law or law of nature is a scientific generalization based on a sufficiently large number of empirical observations that it is taken as fully verified.

The scientific method seeks to explain the complexities of nature in a common, known, and easily replicated way, and to use these explanations to make useful predictions. It provides an objective process to find solutions to problems in a number of scientific and technological fields. Often scientists have a preference for one outcome over another, and scientists are conscientious that it is important that this preference does not bias their interpretation. A strict following of the scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of a scientist's bias on the outcome of an experiment. This can be achieved by correct experimental design, and a thorough peer review of the experimental results as well as conclusions of a study.

Scientists never claim absolute knowledge of nature or the behavior of the subject of the field of study. Certain scientific "facts" are linguistic (such as the fact that humans are mammals), but these are true only by definition, and they reflect only truths relative to agreed convention. These deductive classificational facts may be absolute, but they only say something about human language and expression, but not about the external world. This part of science is like mathematics.

Read more at Wikipedia.org