What is science definition?

*** Science—What Is It?

According to The World Book Encyclopedia, “science covers the broad field of human knowledge concerned with facts held together by principles (rules).” Understandably, there are various kinds of science. The book The Scientist claims: “In theory, almost any kind of knowledge might be made scientific, since by definition a branch of knowledge becomes a science when it is pursued in the spirit of the scientific method.”

This makes for some difficulty in defining, with any precision, where one science begins and another ends. In fact, according to The World Book Encyclopedia, “in some cases, sciences may overlap so much that interdisciplinary fields have been established that combine parts of two or more sciences.” Nevertheless, most reference works speak of four main divisions: physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, and the science of mathematics and logic.

Mathematics a science? Yes, without some unified method of measurement, some way of determining how large, how small, how many, how few, how far, how near, how hot, and how cold, productive scientific investigation would have been impossible. So not without reason, mathematics has been called the “Queen and Servant of the Sciences.”

As for physical sciences, these include chemistry, physics, and astronomy. The main biological sciences are botany and zoology, while social sciences include anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and psychology.

A distinction must be made between pure science and applied science. The former deals purely with the scientific facts and principles themselves; the latter, with their practical application. Today applied science is also known as technology.