📂 1.3 What is science?

In the last 500 years us humans have built a picture of ourselves and our place in the universe that is vast in scope, incredibly detailed and carefully articulated. This picture is not complete and likely never will be since there is always something new to find out about the details even as the overall picture remains in place. This section introduces science by looking at this big picture and also by considering an example of one particular debate about certain details of this picture. The big picture is well captured by a classic video from the 1970’s called “Powers of 10” while the debate is a current debate about the effects of technology on the first generation raised in the era of the smartphone. What holds these two perspectives together — the big picture articulated by many generations of scientists and the microscopic details of one particular scientific debate — is the fact that both arise from a commitment to evidence-driven but skeptical questioning. What does the data really show about the nature of reality from the largest to the smallest scales? This section thus concludes with a discussion of the relationship between science and skepticism.