The Term Science and Knowledge - Essay Example

Everyone knows that science rests on the broad shoulders of facts, without facts there would be no science. But the accumulation of facts only does not make science, just like piling up bricks does not make a house. To make a house one first needs to have chalk-out a plan of the house and then lay the bricks in a definite pattern according to the plan. It's the same thing with facts and science, only facts do not make science. The accumulation of facts, the systematic analysis of these facts, experimentation on these facts, forming a hypothesis, and then arriving at a fixed conclusion through these facts is what science is.

The green leaf is a simple fact, but the knowledge that green leaves produce food for plant and releases oxygen into the atmosphere is science. This conclusion was derived after scientifically analyzing the fact that the leaves are green and by experimenting with this fact. This is how facts work together and create science. (Carter Stein J, 2006) The world is full of facts, we eat, that is a fact, we sleep, that is a fact, we laugh, and that is a fact; so if we look at the world this way through facts that then everything in this world and every moment of our lives adds up to science.

Right from our waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night totals up and makes way for science. Even our dreams and thoughts are a part of science as they are also facts and with a logical and systematic approach people have made a science out of them.No branch of knowledge is devoid of science, anything that requires reason, logic, thinking, and systematic approach is science, so even the branch of knowledge like history, though a humanitarian subject can be said to be a form of science. As history is also the collection of facts though one may have to dig it up, and systematically lay them becomescience like laying the bricks for building a house.

The term science comes from the Latin word 'science' which means knowledge, but knowledge, as one knows, is the fact or the whole truth that can be shared with no questions asked, whereas if a chemist or a physicist is doing some research in a lab on their fields one may call it science, but not knowledge. The simple reason why it cannot be called knowledge is that no one knows about the science that is being done in the lab. So now the question arises when does science which itself means knowledge become knowledge The answer to this is that the science in the lab becomes knowledge only when the researcher gets to the truth of the matter on which he was carrying out the science in the lab.