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GIGO

The Beginning of Science

When did science begin? It's a question we've been debating in the medieval research and recreation group to which I belong. A recent Arts and Science Tournament saw plenty of entries from the arts (embroidery, calligraphy, illumination, singing), but little in the way of science.

Of course it's difficult to practice science in the way that one practices the arts -- that way lies the more applied areas of technology and engineering. These were represented in the tournament by hand-made crossbows, beautiful and functional pieces of armour; interesting items in themselves, but not what most people would think of as representing science. So what sort of science could we practice? A suggestion that we attempt some recreational logic brought hollow laughter.

Part of the problem is that, at its very heart, science attempts to expand our knowledge of the world. In that sense it's rather difficult to undertake in recreating a medieval context. You can build a replica of Galileo's telescope, but you can't claim to have discovered the craters of the Moon or the larger moons around Jupiter. Without that sense of discovery, of "voyaging into strange seas of thought", you take the heart out of science.

But there's more to it than that. I contend that "science"didn't really exist in the 600-1600AD period which delineates our group. Certainly there were the writings of the Greeks, and experimenters and theorists such as Kepler, Vesalius and Paracelsus, but I tend to think of the modern scientific method as really having its genesis in the writings of Francis Bacon in the 1620s. It was his emphasis on the rigorous search for facts, for experimentation, for observation, for independence from appeals to authority that really laid the foundation for scientific induction.

It is these things which make "science" so much more than merely a synonym for "knowledge", a simplistic definition which continues to bedevil it today. One can argue that science does, to a certain extent, carry its own historical baggage and cultural context with it. This does not mean that we cannot distinguish between astrology and astronomy, alchemy and chemistry, beastiaries and zoology -- interesting though they all are, it is clear which belong to science and which do not.

Vicki Hyde is the editor of New Zealand Science Monthly.