hat concept held out until the Enlightenment, when scientists then proposed a theory of a substance called phlogiston, which was released upon combustion and thus made its products lighter than the substance itself. Ash is lighter than the wood used to burn it. This theory made sense given the data observed.
Then came Antoine Lavoisier, who in 1783 realised that metals gain weight upon combustion. The burning of iron produces iron oxides, which are heavier than the iron itself. It then led him to devise experiments showing that oxygen had weight, and then proposed a theory suggesting a fluid called caloric that flowed from warm to colder bodies.
In 1845, James Prescott Joule proved that heat was a mechanical phenomenon, which could explain the transfer of heat without the need for an extra substance as a mediator. And with this final stroke, we have the current theory of heat that we still use today. There are still traces of caloric theory in the way we speak of heat, like when we talk about the “flow of heat” and “calories”.
The empirical facts were the same throughout history, but two things changed: the discovery of new data and the interpretations of the existing data. With every new bit of information we feed into science, science adapts and changes its frameworks to fit. This can be explained by considering the scientific endeavour within a statistical framework. Information and facts gathered through observing the world around us will inevitably be interpreted through different lenses, introducing subjectivity to science.
Even the presentation of science is subjective. John Oliver did a piece on it, debunking many studies being reported by half-baked news reporters digging for the next clickbait by grossly misrepresenting reputable research. A study showed that 34% of studies reported by newspapers were eventually disproven. It is simply easy to misreport an article with the title “excess sleep may lead to more fatigue throughout the day” as “scientists have shown we should sleep less”.
Science is even cultural. The methods of thinking about science today are predominantly Western-centric, but that is not to say other cultures around the world have not developed their own scientific cultures. One need only look back at the height of Islamic science under the Ottomans, or Indian scientists like Bose and Raman to see how, under different cultural norms and assumptions, science still flourished independently of Western culture.
Modern science (at least till the advent of the 21st Century) has taken a diversified and specialised approach, where each individual field runs independently and does not need to interact with other fields. However, in recent years, there have been a lot of cross-faculty research going on where scientists now realise they need other people with different ways of seeing problems to partner with. This holistic way of viewing science has fundamentally been the way science has been done from the Mayans to the Australian aboriginals to the Chinese. These ways of thinking, however, have been swept away with the mass colonialization of other cultures and imposition of a Western-centric view of science. We can and should learn a lot from how other cultures approached science and understood nature.
The presentation of science is subjective. It is simply easy to misreport an article with the title “excess sleep may lead to more fatigue throughout the day” as “scientists have shown we should sleep less”.
Is science the answer to everything?
The second trap one can fall into is intellectual hubris, or scientism. Science, as shown above, is fundamentally empirical and is descriptive, not prescriptive. In The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (1955) by Werner Heisenberg, he emphasises that:
a natural science is one whose propositions on limited domains of nature can have only a correspondingly limited validity… modern science, in its beginnings, was characterised by a conscious modesty; it made statements about strictly limited relations that are only valid within the framework of these limitations.The Phy