Sains

”’Sains merupakan sebuah proses pengumpulan ilmu atau maklumat dan penyusunannya. Perkataan sains datang daripada bahasa Latin, scinetia, yang bermakna mendapatkan ilmu atau maklumat. Dan seperti proses mendapatkan maklumat yang lain, sains bermula dengan pengalaman, dan kemudiannya mendapatkan fakta dan peraturan daripadaya.

Cara sains mengkaji sesuatu perkara adalah dengan melihatnya dengan teliti, mengukurnya, membuat uji kaji, dan dengan cuba menerangkan mengapa sesuatu perkara terjadi. Mereka yang melakukan perkara ini dipanggil ahli sains.

Setiap pakar sains perlu berhati-hati apabila memberi penerangan mengenai sesuatu yang mereka kaji. Mereka bertanding untuk memberikan penjelasan yang lebih baik. Boleh jadi sesuatu penjelasan itu menarik, tetapi jika ia tidak sama dengan apa yang dikatakan oleh pakar sains lain, kajian seterusnya perlu dilakukan lagi untuk mendapatkan penjelasan yang lebih baik.

Pakar sains juga memeriksa idea pakar sains lain. Ini kerana pakar sains juga merupakan manusia, yang tidak boleh lari dari melakukan kesilapan. Jadi pakar sains perlu mempastikan bahawa idea yang digunakannya adalah betul. Peer review dan mengulangi eksperimen beberapaka kali merupakan satu-satunya cara untuk mempastikan bahawa maklumat yang diperolehi adalah benar dan tepat.

Inilah yang dipanggil kaedah saintifik. Kebanyakan orang menerima kaedah ini sebagai cara yang paling boleh dipercayai untuk mendapatkan maklumat mengenai alam, dunia, badan manusia atau binatang dan lain-lain. Walau bagaimanapun, perlu diingati bahawa sains merupakan suatu proses yang berterusan, apa yang benar hari ini mungkin kurang tepat dalam masa 100 tahun lagi.

 

Science (from Latin scientia, meaning “knowledge”) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.^[1] In an older and closely related meaning (found, for example, in Aristotle), “science” refers to the body of reliable knowledge itself, of the type that can be logically and rationally explained (see History and philosophy below).^[2] Since classical antiquity science as a type of knowledge was closely linked to philosophy. In the early modern era the words “science” and “philosophy” were sometimes used interchangeably in the English language. By the 17th century, natural philosophy (which is today called “natural science“) was considered a separate branch of philosophy.^[3] However, “science” continued to be used in a broad sense denoting reliable knowledge about a topic, in the same way it is still used in modern terms such as library science or political science.

In modern use, “science” more often refers to a way of pursuing knowledge, not only the knowledge itself. It is “often treated as synonymous with ‘natural and physical science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics. This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use.”^[4] This narrower sense of “science” developed as scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton began formulating laws of nature such as Newton’s laws of motion. In this period it became more common to refer to natural philosophy as “natural science”. Over the course of the 19th century, the word “science” became increasingly associated with scientific method, a disciplined way to study the natural world, including physics, chemistry, geology and biology. It is in the 19th century also that the term scientist was created by the naturalist-theologian William Whewell to distinguish those who sought knowledge on nature from those who sought knowledge on other disciplines. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the origin of the word “scientist” to 1834. This sometimes left the study of human thought and society in a linguistic limbo, which was resolved by classifying these areas of academic study as social science. Similarly, several other major areas of disciplined study and knowledge exist today under the general rubric of “science”, such as formal science and applied science.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia