Science
This article is about the general term. For other uses, see Science (disambiguation).
Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizesknowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about theuniverse.[2][3][4] In an older and closely related meaning, "science" also refers to a body of knowledge itself, of the type that can be rationally explained and reliably applied. A practitioner of science is known as a scientist.
In classical antiquity, science as a type of knowledge was closely linked tophilosophy. During the Islamic Golden Age, the foundation for the scientific method was laid, which emphasized experimental data and reproducibility of its results.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] In the Westduring the early modern period the words "science" and "philosophy of nature" were sometimes used interchangeably,[13] And not until the 17th century, natural philosophy (which is today called "natural science") was considered a separate branch ofphilosophy in the West.[14]
In modern usage, "science" most often refers to a way of pursuing knowledge, not only the knowledge itself. It is also often restricted to those branches of study that seek to explain the phenomena of the material universe.[15]In the 17th and 18th centuries scientists increasingly sought to formulate knowledge in terms of laws of naturesuch as Newton's laws of motion. And over the course of the 19th century, the word "science" became increasingly associated with the scientific methoditself, as a disciplined way to study the natural world, including physics,chemistry, geology and biology. It is in the 19th century also that the termscientist was created by the naturalist-theologian William Whewell to distinguish those who sought knowledge on nature from those who sought other types of knowledge.[16]
However, "science" has also continued to be used in a broad sense to denote reliable and teachable knowledge about a topic, as reflected in modern terms like library science or computer science. This is also reflected in the names of some areas of academic study such as "social science" or "political science".
The scale of the universe mapped to the branches of science and the hierarchy of science.[17]
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