• Question: do you make science or is science or ready there? (im intrested in knowing if u have to make science)

    Asked by infinityandbeyond to Jake, James, Pete, Senga, Simonne on 8 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Jake Langham

      Jake Langham answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      What a philosophical mind you have! Here’s my opinion. In science our goal is basically to try and understand the universe that we live in. The facts about the universe are already there, we just have to discover them and make sense of them. But there are things that we ‘make’ called scientific ‘theories’ or ‘models’. (Some you might have heard of like the ‘theory of gravity’ or the ‘theory of evolution’.) The theories that we make are designed to explain the results that we get when we take observations or do experiments. One of the main jobs of scientists is to keep testing theories to check whether they can predict different things that happen in the world. Sometimes we discover things that don’t make sense with a particular theory and then we have to be creative and come up with a new, better one.

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      So the short answer is that science is partly ‘already there’ and partly ‘made by scientists’.

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      Side note: in my field of mathematics, people aren’t really sure whether maths is already there or just made up by mathematicians to amuse themselves. For instance: did we discover numbers, or did we invent them? I’m not completely sure, what do you think?

    • Photo: Senga Robertson

      Senga Robertson answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      Hi Infinityandbeyond

      another fantastic question!

      For me I think the science is already there….we just need to discover it. We discover new, better ways to do things and discover things to invent to solve problems every day! It makes me excited about the science I will discover in the future and proud of the science I already have discovered.

      Senga 🙂

    • Photo: Pete Gwynne

      Pete Gwynne answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      i think of science as a way of finding out things. so if you don’t know something, you can do some science to find out. so i think we invented science as a way of learning about things that are already there.

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