Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation . . .
As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way:
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
Real science is always more like auto mechanics - getting the damned thing to work - than is dreamed of by philosophers in their texts on scientific method.
I think that we shall have to get accustomed to the idea that we must not look upon science as a "body of knowledge", but rather as a system of hypotheses, or as a system of guesses or anticipations that in principle cannot be justified, but with which we work as long as they stand up to tests, and of which we are never justified in saying that we know they are "true".
Science is a wonderful thing, if one doesn't have to earn a living at it.
A carpenter, a schoolteacher, and scientist were traveling by train through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.
"Aha," said the carpenter with a smile, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."
"Hmm," said the school teacher, "You mean that some Scottish sheep are black."
"No," said the scientist glumly, "All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black."
From a lecture in one or more of my science classes
Science is the process of "finding out." It is the art of interrogating nature, a system of inquiry that requires curiosity, intellectual honesty, skepticism, tolerance for ambiguity, and openness to new ideas and the sharing of knowledge.
To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts.
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.
The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulations, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.
Contrary to popular belief, scientists are not detached observers of nature and the facts they discover are not simply inherent in the natural phenomena they observe. Scientists construct facts by constantly making decisions about what they will consider significant, what experiments they should pursue, and how they will describe their observations.
The nature of science which is in essence:
“epistemology of science, science is a way of knowing, or the values and beliefs inherent to scientific knowledge and its development. ”
Science is the use of evidence to construct testable explanations and predictions of natural phenomena, as well as the knowledge generated through this process.
The nature of science has these common characteristics: