The Philosophy of Science

I do science because I want to see how things operate causally. I believe they should operate causally.

Science is about how to comprehend natural phenomena in a logical way. The phenomena, at first glance, seem scattered and unrelated, the unification of which is the goal of science. Science attempts to achieve unification with a conceptual model, based on which logical deductions set in. In science, one tries to relate various phenomena using the possibly smallest number of concepts and axioms, much the way everything about flat space geometry is wholly built on Pythagorean theorem. Doing science is like a play. The player all the time looks for new way of playing with the toy in hand. Frequently, he looks for new toys. He examines a toy from various perspectives and thinks about what will happen if some conditions are given. And he tries to do what he speculates. He entertains himself in doing this. The toy for scientists is any piece of Nature.

We take a piece of Nature and think what we can do with it. We may place it in a heat bath and measure its heat capacity. We may apply an electric field to it and watch its responses. We may consider how a beam of light can be influenced by it. Or, we may bombard it using a beam of electrons or other kinds of particles and observe what will happen to the beam and the target. We want to know more and more of what will happen if this and that ... ...On the other hand, we may also examine it theoretically, namely, we put forth a model and employ math and ideas to make predictions on what may occur given this and that ... ...We also contrast the predictions with observations and see how fit the model is and see how a better understanding may be accomplished with another model.

It is not simply about experiments and models. It is fundamentally about how to know more of and how to better understand nature, rationally. It is about exploring nature. It is a pursuit. It is an Odyssey. Science is a life style. Like arts, science is an endeavor to capture the world.

Incidentally, it is essential to realize that, science is not a part of Nature itself, but rather of human's culture. Thus, though it proves of great values to mankind's development, science does not bear any objective meanings. It is shaped by humans, as clothes. As once remarked by Albert Einstein, 'one knows little of life. Anyway, how much does a fish know of the water it lives in ?'