What is Science, really…?

What is science? Engaging in this kind of imaginative speculation isn’t really what science is about, natually. Science only describes properties and objects in the end for these phenomena are experimentally observed, or for objects and their properties are defined according to the methods of measurement. It seems that science doesn’t question existence itself. So when we look at things that exist and ask why they exist, why they are the way they are, there’s not much to say. It’s almost like saying “It is what it is.” Just as when I asked my professor a while ago in classical EM class, “Why is the scaling factor of the Lagrangian for a free particle with charge defined to be proportional to $-mc$?” the professor responded, “Don’t ask me why, actually I don’t know why. It is just what it is and just the way nature works.” Is that all there is to it—that we simply observe a particular pattern in the experimental observation of matter, phenomena, or system states, and though we don’t know why, we just acknowledge that nature works that way, define the pattern, and systematically organize it, while attaching no greater meaning and thus having nothing more to say? This is the only thought that comes to mind, though of course, I might change my perspective later on.

The answer is not easily forthcoming. To me, science is the process of building models about objective entities and then verifying those models through experiments to see how well they match reality. It seems that factors like falsifiability, the extent to which objects are well-defined in a physical sense, and how well the system (reality) can be predicted all influence this process to some degree. One well-known anecdote related to this topic is a conversation between Heisenberg and Einstein. Einstein once said to Heisenberg, “You speak of what we know about nature, but you do not speak of how nature actually works. We do science to understand how nature really works. That is the most important thing.”

But can we really know how nature — the objective reality - truly functions, or is that ultimately just a matter of imagination or conjecture? I still do not know. Take an extreme example: when we observe a 2D plane, our visual perception is always processed through projective space, meaning that the plane is not perceived in its true form but always through a projective transformation as it is input into the brain. Thus we only imagine the affine plane based on the information from the projective space, and it is possible that we can never truly know what the plane “actually” looks like… Of course, terms like “know” and “understand” are inherently ambiguous, which makes things even more complicated.

Another issue is experimental verification. In scientific experiments, we compare measured values with true values, but we can never know if the “true value” is actually true. No experiment is without error. So there is an implicit assumption that as we more precisely measure physical quantities, the data will converge toward the theoretical value, assuming the theory is correct. This means that experimental precedence isn’t always necessary since we can also approach it from the perspective that the approximations of a more fundamental structure should converge on the model value at a macroscopic level (like in canonical quantization).

For this reason, some physicists describe this as a “scientific belief.” But the belief in question here isn’t like religious belief; rather, it’s closer to the “belief” from JTB (Justified True Belief) conditions in modern epistemology, which define knowledg, I guess.

At least one thing is certain: science does not deal with science itself. The subjects of natural science are natural phenomena, not natural science itself. But who dare can say they know the truth? One thing a ‘good scientist’ can do is just being curious forever…