Scientific Philosophy

I have always been interested in science. I loved learning about how the world could be experimented on and, most of all, understood. It was only in my first year of university, studying a Bachelor of Science, that the philosophy of science was properly presented to me. Here, two major concepts I learnt laid the foundation for my change in worldview.

Speaking of views. Photo by me.

The first was the idea of empiricism. Scientific knowledge is gained through human experience. While doing experiments in my physics courses, I learnt that everything that is measured has uncertainty. A good example of this is simply measuring the length of a pencil with a ruler. You can use the ruler and read off a number, but the number you read depends on many things. Even if you do your best to read the number carefully, your measurement still relies on the precision of your ruler. The smallest markings my ruler has are millimetres. This means that, using my ruler, I can never know whether the pencil is 191.1 mm or 191.2 mm, only that it is about 191 mm. This concept can be extended to every experiment ever done. This means that there is nothing in experimental science that can ever be exactly known.

The second was falsifiability. Scientific knowledge can only be advanced by investigating statements that can be proven wrong. A good example of a falsifiable idea is ‘all Australians have blue eyes’. To prove this wrong, one must simply find an Australian who doesn’t have blue eyes. If all Australians really did have blue eyes, this idea can still always be proven wrong. Through this lens, all scientific knowledge is a collection of ideas that haven’t been proven wrong.

Learning these things helped me identify beliefs I had that were impossible to know for sure. For example, that God created the universe. It also led me to gain trust in scientific theories I believed to be wrong. Such as, the theory of evolution by natural selection and the big bang theory.