Question: Why is it called science?

Jon Copley answered on 15 Jun 2010:

The word “science” comes from the Latin word “scientia”, which means knowledge. Science gives us *reliable* knowledge about the world around us, because in science we never just take anyone else’s word that something is true.

Richard Feynman, who was one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, once described science as “the belief in the ignorance of experts”. That’s one of my favourite quotes about science. What he meant is that we don’t accept ideas in science just because someone in authority tells them to us. We test ideas for ourselves in science, and if they stand up to our tests, then we accept them.

I like that because it means it doesn’t matter who you are in science, or what you’ve done in the past – all that matters is how good your evidence is for the idea you are proposing. Someone can be a complete newcomer or outsider, and still make a major advance.

And people who have won a Nobel Prize for a big discovery have gone on to be completely wrong in their ideas about other areas of science. So in science, there really are no “experts” – what someone has done in the past doesn’t make them necessarily more likely to be right in the future. But getting things wrong is an important part of science too – science gives us reliable knowledge about the world around us because science learns from its “mistakes”.