Reaction to Asimov's "What is science?"

The chapter by Asimov gave a chronicle review of the development of science. It started from how human beings became interested in learning about the world, how science differed from fine arts, how mythology, religion, and science were interweaved and developed. It reviewed the ancient Greek scientists’ work and their limitation. The work on induction by Galileo and Newton was also discussed. The paper outlined the basic principles of modern science and presented some existing problems.

In this chapter, the goal of science was attributed to curiosity. In Paul Reynolds’  “A Primer in Theory Construction”, it is argued that science serves four purposes (providing typologies, explanation, predication and a sense of understanding), all of which can be related to human curiosity.

The development of Greek science reminds me of the development of science in ancient China. Ancient Greek scientists relied too much on deduction and preferred abstraction and generalization. They undervalued knowledge related to real-life problems. On the contrary, ancient Chinese were more pragmatic. They paid special attentions to induction and practical applications, but failed to generalize abstract theories from their practice. For example, the 3-4-5 relationship among three sides of a right triangle was also found and documented by Chinese even earlier than Egyptian did, but they seemed satisfied with this discovery and were not curious enough to generalize it with mathematical proof. Actually, the history of Chinese science development was full of observations of phenomenon without solid theories. That is why a lot of people believe that there was no science in ancient China. From another perspective, Chinese are born to be engineers. They built great things to solve real-world problems, without knowing the scientific principles or incentives to explore why. For example, they created gunpowder without exploring the chemical components and reactions; they spent time and efforts on creating complicated compass, but not on exploring the magnetic field of the earth.

The modern science proposed on this chapter is similar to that proposed by Popper in his book “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”. Similarly, Paul Reynolds wrote in his book “A Primer in Theory Construction” that a scientific theory must have abstractness, intersubjectivity (explicitness and rigorousness) and empirical relevance. It is argued that science does not always contain truth about the world. Instead, it is a collection of ideas that are inducted from observations and have survived systematic tests that aimed at falsifying them.

Another thought of mine was inspired by the discussion of the problems in modern science. There are basically two approaches in science nowadays: First, focus on a specific domain to explore in-depth knowledge (e.g. analyze the DNA of humans). Second, bring different disciplines together in multi- or inter-disciplinary research (e.g. the iSchool movement). I would assume that both approaches have been beneficial for the development of science. However, the specialization of science has made it more and more difficult for one person to be an expert in multiple disciplines. It is thus rare in modern science to have someone like Galileo Galilei, who has made great contributions to mathematics, physics, astronomy and philosophy.

Is the high specialization a good thing? Maybe, because it has enabled us to know more about us and the world. However, I am afraid that when more and more scientists focus only on his narrow topics and dig deeper and deeper without a good knowledge of the consequences in other areas, the outcome of their research may not be beneficial to human beings any more.