Science
This page is one of the explanatory pages for my website, http://www.CardinalKnowledge.org. The website is a work in progress, and each and every part of it is open for discussion. The comments to these explanatory pages are where this discussion is to take place.
Science is one of the four fundamental directions of the human collective knowledge. Unlike art, religion, or philosophy, it is based on the human ability to doubt.
When a scientist publishes new results, other scientists examine the findings, trying to prove them wrong. This is the procedure of peer review, which is a requirement for any new scientific work, and this is also the common response of the community at large. When faced with new work, after it was peer-reviewed, scientists look for the boundaries, the conditions where the new finding no longer works, in order to discover something new for themselves, and to improve the overall understanding of the problem. If the original finding does not reproduce or is otherwise fraudulent, it will be discovered and, in the worst case, the publication will be retracted (as happened, for example, to the infamous publication on water memory and homeopathy). Without doubt, without rigorous verification and falsification, any bogus statement could have a chance to become part of scientific knowledge, and with bogus statements the scientific knowledge would no longer reflect the objective reality, the reality that can be observed by others in reproducible manner.
It took a long time to realize the importance of doubt to science. Although the scientific method has been around since the 17th century works of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, only in the 20th century Karl Popper managed to formulate the philosophical definition of science through the concept of falsifiablity, which became the current criterion, the definition of what science is.
For the examples of science, I’ve chosen a few random scientific advances that are in use by nearly everyone or affected nearly everyone, and have immense amounts of scientific research behind them. Of course there are countless more (ever thought about the life without refrigerators or without telephones or without electricity?), I’ve chosen MRI, GPS, insulin, atomic bomb, suspension bridge, and, of course, computers.