The following text written by Don Radler, Editor of UniScience News
Net, Inc., and quoted here as ASCII text from

                   <http://unisci.com/science2.htm>

may interest the SaC listers.

>>                     UniScience News Net, Inc.

                            * Why Science? *

Philosopher-scientist Herbert Spencer once defined science as
"organized knowledge." But your current shopping list is an example of
organized knowledge, and it's not science. So what is science, really?
An interviewer recently asked me just that, and I gave her some kind
of answer. Thinking more about it since then, here's what I wish I had
said:

Science is the design or conduct of reproducible experiments to test
how nature works, or the creation of theories that can themselves be
tested by such experiments. Science is also the orderly observation of
events that cannot yet be manipulated, and, ultimately, the testing of
many different such observations as the basis for theories to explain
the events.

This makes science the one human activity that seeks knowledge in an
organized way. It's not the knowledge that's organized, it's the
seeking. Science doesn't guess, doesn't hope, doesn't wish, doesn't
trust, doesn't believe.

Science seeks.

It's the search that makes science so powerful and so exciting.
Science does add to our store of knowledge, but some of the knowledge
it adds turns out to hurt more than it helps. Science does lead to new
products, some of which prove not to be so good, either. It's the
seeking that makes science what it is.

Seeking is a uniquely humble human experience. It doesn't say I know,
it says I need to find out. It doesn't declare one thing better than
another, it merely describes each thing as it finds it. It doesn't
tell anyone how to do anything, it merely discovers how nature does
things.

Humble, nonjudgmental, nondirective. What other human enterprise has
this cluster of attributes, this quiet dignity? And the best that
there is of this enterprise goes on at universities, where much of the
research is basic science, a simple search for truth. UniSci is
pleased to have American universities as its "beat," and the research
they perform as the material it covers.

We hope we cover it well. We also hope that our coverage will enhance
the respect that society has for the scientific method and the
scientific bent of mind, and its willingness to support them,
particularly at the level of basic research.

Science is mankind's organized search for truth. That in itself
answers the question, Why Science?

- Don Radler, Editor<<

Greetings!  Rudi Borth  <[log in to unmask]>