Importance Of Science In The World

A term whose Latin equivalent, scientia, means ‘‘knowledge’’. It was used in a similarly broad fashion in English until the seventeenth century, often in complementary partnership with ‘‘conscience’’, which usually referred to a more intuitive or passionate sense of knowing. It was also used more narrowly to refer to an academic discipline or a body of skills, being virtually synonymous in the latter sense with one of the meanings of art.
The principal items of the Medieval university curriculum—the quadrivium (logic, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy) and the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and music)—were sometimes lumped together as the ‘‘seven sciences’’, as in Stephen Hawes’ allegorical Passetyme of Pleasure; or, the Historie of Graunde Amoure and La Belle Pucel, Containing the Knowledge of the Seven Sciences and the Course of Man’s Life in This Worlde (written 1506; printed 1509), but as the ‘‘New Learning’’ made further progress in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it became increasingly common to draw distinctions between ‘‘arts’’ and ‘‘sciences’’, resulting in a gradual restriction of the latter term to disciplines requiring theoretical understanding. Andrew Maunsell’s pioneering Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (1595) employed a tripartite fundamental division of the New Learning. The first (and much the largest) category was that of ‘‘Divinitie’’; the second contained two subdivisions, ‘‘Arithmetick, Geometrie, Astronomie, Astrologie, Musick, The Art of Warre and Navigation’’ being lumped together as Mathematicall, while Physick and Surgery were combined in their own subcategory; the third section—which was never completed—lumped ‘‘Gramer, Logick, Rethorick, Lawe, Historie, Poetrie, Policie, etc.’’ under the general heading Humanity. This taxonomic scheme is still echoed in modern university organisation, in the slightly blurred distinction between theology, theoretical and applied sciences, and ‘‘the humanities’’.
From the early eighteenth century onwards, the distinctive meaning of ‘‘science’’ became more sharply refined, referring to a body of observations subject to theoretical organisation; this became the word’s modern meaning, displacing ‘‘natural philosophy’’ to become the key element in a parcel of terms that also included the modern meaning of ‘‘empirical’’ investigation and ‘‘experimental’’ proof. Mark Akenside’s ‘‘Hymn to Science’’ (1739) retains a broader meaning of the term, but is aware in so doing that the meaning is old-fashioned and requires a certain exercise of poetic licence. It was not until the early nineteenth century, however, that such phrases as ‘‘the scientific method’’ and ‘‘scientific truth’’ entered common currency, and retrospective reference to a ‘‘scientific revolution’’ within the New Learning, led by such heroes as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, became commonplace. William Whewell’s summaries of the history and philosophy of science in 1837–1840 cemented the modern notion of what science is—or what sciences are—within the English language.
The original synonymy of science and knowledge is retained in the positivist view that only the contents of science constitute authentic knowledge of the world, all other claims being metaphysical, and hence bogus. Such a view is, however, controversial, often cited as evidence of the kind of arrogance that licenses use of the term ‘‘scientism’’. Attempts by the logical positivists and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (1921) to rule all statements that are incapable of scientific justification devoid of meaning caused considerable resentment, and were soon overtaken by more generous and more flexible theories of meaning. The idea persisted that there is some kind of supplementary or ‘‘higher’’ truth of which scientific truth is only a component; the Notion is very often given literary expression, assisted by a widespread belief among litterateurs that great literature is itself a component of that higher knowledge. The most obvious literary reflection of the history of the term ‘‘science’’ is the emergence and proliferation of the genres of ‘‘scientific romance’’ and ‘‘science fiction’’, whose dominance by speculative futuristic fiction emphasises the notion of science as a dynamic force determining the evolution of human thought and—via its technological spin-off—practical endeavour. It is this notion, rather than any mere acquaintance with sophisticated theory, that was responsible for the growth in the twentieth century of a ‘‘culture of science’’ distinguishable, in C. P. Snow’s sense, from the culture of literature and the arts. Even litterateurs who would not endorse the proposition that literature is a component of higher knowledge tend to be preoccupied with its heritage, thus tending to a nostalgic conservatism that is at odds with the transformative tendencies of science and technology. (Even those aspects of science that are ‘‘finished’’—in the sense that the relevant laws are fully elucidated— are usually regarded by scientists as instruments of future practical endeavour rather than precious items of conservation.)

Science Fiction

Given all this, it is not surprising that the seemingly oxymoronic phrase ‘‘science fiction’’ is of recent and disreputable coinage, routinely seeming offensive to scientists and literary men alike, nor that, while science evolved so rapidly and so wondrously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the reflections of that triumphant progress in the literary world were fragmentary, elliptical, and grudging. Nor is it any wonder that even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—while science went from strength to strength in establishing its empire of belief—the vast majority of litterateurs remained conspicuously diffident or dissident, mostly refusing to have any truck with it except to hurl occasional abuse. The surprising thing is not that ‘‘science fiction’’ was born despicable in an age of scientific glory, but that it was ever born at all. When the term ‘‘science fiction’’ was reinvented in the 1920s to describe a new genre of popular fiction—whose commodification was eventually successful, though gradual and far from unproblematic—its inventors and adherents had little difficulty in constructing a literary tradition going back fifty years, and a little more, but they had to recognise that the body of work in question was a mere trickle compared to the vast surge of the literary ‘‘mainstream’’: a tradition that had been and remained stubbornly indifferent to, if not proudly ignorant of, the progress of science. Nor did the advent of science fiction signal or hold out any hope for a modification of policy; indeed, science fiction emerged as a labeled genre at exactly the moment in history at which the last vestiges of intellectual communion between scientific and literary men were in the process of being severed, resulting in the emergence, in C. P. Snow’s famous formulation, of ‘‘the two cultures.’’
The evolution of generic science fiction since the label was coined—as tracked in such volumes as the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction compiled by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in 1992—has not involved any conspicuous sophistication of the relationship between its two ostensible components. Indeed, the label was so promiscuously applied that it became necessary within a few decades of its coinage to invent a special term (‘‘hard’’ science fiction)—to describe the small fraction of texts published under the label that attempted to maintain a manifest respect for the scientific method and its produce. Within a few decades more, even that term had been cheapened to the point at which it was routinely used to refer to any texts sheltering under the label’s umbrella that contained any reference whatsoever to science, the vast majority having none at all.

New Technology

The meanings of the terms science and technology have changed significantly from one generation to another. More similarities than differences, however, can be found between the terms.
Both science and technology imply a thinking process, both are concerned with causal relationships in the material world, and both employ an experimental methodology that results in empirical demonstrations that can be verified by repetition (see Scientific Method). Science, at least in theory, is less concerned with the practicality of its results and more concerned with the development of general laws, but in practice science and technology are inextricably involved with each other. The varying interplay of the two can be observed in the historical development of such practitioners as chemists, engineers, physicists, astronomers, carpenters, potters, and many other specialists. Differing educational requirements, social status, vocabulary, methodology, and types of rewards, as well as institutional objectives and professional goals, contribute to such distinctions as can be made between the activities of scientists and technologists; but throughout history the practitioners of “pure” science have made many practical as well as theoretical contributions.
Indeed, the concept that science provides the ideas for technological innovations and that pure research is therefore essential for any significant advancement in industrial civilization is essentially a myth. Most of the greatest changes in industrial civilization cannot be traced to the laboratory. Fundamental tools and processes in the fields of mechanics, chemistry, astronomy, metallurgy, and hydraulics were developed before the laws governing their functions were discovered. The steam engine, for example, was commonplace before the science of thermodynamics elucidated the physical principles underlying its operations.
In recent years a sharp value distinction has grown up between science and technology. Advances in science have frequently had their bitter opponents, but today many people have come to fear technology much more than science. For these people, science may be perceived as a serene, objective source for understanding the eternal laws of nature, whereas the practical manifestations of technology in the modern world now seem to them to be out of control.