On the Art of Science

Today, I will write about a somewhat common misconception about science. And it is centered around the phrase "It's an art, not a science." When someone says that, what they generally mean is something more along the lines of "It is a non-algorithmical process." Or equivelently, "It is something that can't be done by a computer." But I think that that phrase is damaging to the public perception of science. In fact we could use that phrase to describe every field of scienc that I am aware of, becuase they all require a significant amount of creative, imaginative, and distinctly non-algorithmical thinking. And these days, many of the parts of science that are simply precisely following a set procedure are done by computers, or are otherwise largely mechanized.

That isn't to say that collecting and cataloging data using precise repeatable procedures isn't an important of science, but saying that that is all of science is like saying that the mechanics of applying paint onto canvas is all of art. But there is some much more to science. For one thing interpretting the results require a great deal of creativity. If the universe worked the way we expected it to there would be no place for science. Science progresses only because of people that are able to think outside the box and come up with plausable explanations for data that doesn't fit the currently accepted models. For another, scientists most come up with increasingly more inventive ways of collecting data. The experimental methods of the 1600's are entirely inadequate for exploring the internal structure of atoms, much less finding the Higgs boson, or analyzing gamma ray bursts (forgive me if my examples are a little, well a lot, biased toward physics and astronomy, that is what I know best). Science is not, simply applying the rules of the universe to certain problems, although that is the way it is often taught in primary and secandary school. Rather it is trying to discover what those laws are, and there aren't any preset rules on how to do that.