What is Science?

In recent months, I have joined a group dedicated to the promotion of science, The Alliance for Science. There was recently a call for position statements for the website, which I am in the process of writing. In my research, I came across this speech on the title topic by Richard Feynman. It is a wonderful speech despite the sexism in parts. His definition of science is spot on. He starts by building up to a description of the development "intelligence" first as individuals solving problems, then as individuals communicating experience and ideas to other individuals creating a cultural "race memory." He continues

This phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world--but it had a disease in it: it was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable.

So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.

Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race['s] experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition.

That is a good definition. He boils it down to one sentence later in the speech "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

Over at ScienceBlogs, Chad Orzel's Uncertain Principles has put out a call for votes for the Greatest Physics Experiment, offering up eleven candidates. One of the candidates is Galileo, for two experiments. One of them, the one on the motion of objects, I remember having to reproduce in high school. Galileo timed balls of different weights as they rolled down inclined planes to see if heavier ones reached the bottom of the run before the lighter ones. Aristotle had claimed that they would. That's what my "common-sense" told me before I did the experiment. But as anyone who has done the experiment remembers, it's not true that heavier balls reach the bottom before lighter balls. My common-sense had mislead me. I had fooled myself into thinking that I knew something -- something that was in fact false.

So I would add to Feynman's one-line definition something else, also said by Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." Thus, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, and in the misleading nature of common sense. It is a method for minimizing the influence of biases; for weeding out "all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs."