WHAT IS SCIENCE?

                                                         SCIENCE.
After years of studying science in the classes, from books, audio books, biographies of the legendary scientists, researches and my own pondering about our universe, I still found a question troubling my mind after a chat with a friend. This question kept me asking myself, “What is science?”…. It was a short chat with a friend who studies aerospace engineering in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).
I asked him a question I later regretted. What makes you think you are reading science? He answered; because I’m reading aerospace engineering…he continued, listing things he could do with his knowledge in the field.My curiosity wasn’t satisfied, I felt I should ask more, so I asked--- What is science? This time it took him some few seconds to type, I kept counting the seconds; anxious to see what he says this time. He answered,” Science is everything!”

Though I continued typing as we talked, I was driven into a world far misty, nothing was clear. What is everything, what is nothing? We all use these words in our language, but how definite are these words. I lost the focus throughout the chat, the idea of space and time convicted me of curiosity, my mind couldn’t settle to see any clear picture; it was like being pulled into a world of fairies making you feel you are one.
 I ended the chat with my friend wishing I could have confessed how immensely I was galvanized by our talk and the dimension of reality I just caught hold of. As I walked home I kept asking questions that were simple but difficult to find the answers.

If I say, everything about this girl is adorable. It could only be true if and only if at that particular place and time I know all that she is, excluding the thoughts of others about her. How do I know all about her; what joules of heat energy is loosing out of her body every second? How much radiation is she receiving and what micro organisms are interacting internally in her system?what is she thinking about in that moment? As I kept asking these questions I understood all I could know about her was only a thought dimension predetermined in my subconciousness, perhaps they could all be my responses towards her. I was not being scientific enough.To know her truly was  to keep thoughts (judgments) aside and just observe her every fraction of a microsecond.
But this was more insane, every microsecond she becomes a new person with a different age, in a second her lungs filled with air, during the next second she pumps air out of her lungs, particular erythrocytes located at different points after every pulse, her senses keep changing attention to the environment as the environment changes conditions. The same happens to the rocks, plants, air molecules… every second sees a change in every constituent of this universe. If we say something is A in a moment, it cannot be A in the next moment.

If science is meant to be characterized mainly by observation, then science can never be everything due to our inability to give undivided attention to all aspects of a specimen in our experiments. Usually we focus on the part that answers our hypothesis, though sometimes we unexpectedly come across other observations leading to theories we never thought of. Science can therefore not be defined as everything! This is because all we know and our dimension of noticing is only how adept we have become in driving our senses towards the expected, yet we constitute only a part of nature---all we know is due to our response to nature (the universe) in which we constitute only a tiny part. Neither can we support our views by the assumption that we are the most complex and we are living organisms whereas others are non-living organisms. The idea of what makes a body living is what we have enumerated, still subject to the diameter of understanding of the world we find ourselves.

Science is a methodology of understanding the world around us, thus, as we have made it to be, but true observation and realization is accountable to experience. As one will say… the best lessons in life are not the ones told but the ones experienced. Our scientific analysis must therefore respect the fact that all conclusions we make are in a way our responses to the specimen, whether we are aware or not. The subject-object relationship is the reason for our result in all experiments. The questions we ask of nature leads us to what we know so far about nature. When we begin to ask different questions we will find a lot more we never could imagine. Science therefore can’t be everything since it never tapers to the pin-point; it disperses from the very point of our questioning to broader perspectives we can’t encompass in a single mind, erupting various fields from the same question that need to be specialized.

Science to me is a way of life. This way of life is beyond the superficial, it’s rather a question-answer chain of life with each fueling the growth of reality in this misty dimension. A question leads to an answer; the answer develops into suggestions which need to be examined, in that process engineering another question that may take decades to answer. Like the journey through quantum physics has bore the questions: what causes the force of gravity in the particle realm or reality; if there are any particles at all what state will they be; charged or neutral? Answers seem easy to find if we are guarded by the minds projections basing on earlier intellect... yet again though it is important building upon earlier knowing, programming the mind to forge understanding and explanation of the subject veils our sight as scientists from the clear picture.

Science needs no beautification; we have to observe what is, and not what is expected to be. We might feel disappointed realizing that most of our earlier knowledge was caged by just a single person’s perceptions, but that doesn’t get close to solving our problems.  Einstein explained during his historic journey through the Theory of Special and General Relativity--- he illustrated something of importance about the way that we structure our perceptions is indicative of an inevitable trend toward the merger of physics and psychology. What has Einstein discovered that got him thinking this way? Einstein had a beginners mind; a mind that ponders with little or no much acknowledgement of the already believed; a mind that wonders if the opposite is true; a mind whose truth is in analysis, and not mere information.

If you read carefully you would realize I was just going round the topic scared of saying anything acclaiming to be science. Science is no more strictly viewed as what you must know, it’s now what do you know individually. Like Buddha saying that a man should find his own salvation, the truth in science is an individual adventure. Science is still made of pragmatic ways to solve problems in our diameter of the universe…for our solution becomes a problem to other members of the universe. This alone explains the fact that we are only viewing our part of the searched reality. This reality, this truth, we cannot find alone; the rocks, rivers, plants, animals etc know a great deal than we do. Do they?
What is science? What is science? What is science?
We can as scientist answer this question individually, yet be free to criticize my definition.
Science is the method of harmonizing with nature, to enable us understand her dance.