Here are some definitions of science:
Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld
The Evolution of Physics
Science is not and will never be a closed book. Every important advance brings new questions. Every development reveals, in the long run, new and deeper difficulties. (p. 308)
Science is not just a collection of laws, a catalogue of unrelated facts. It is a creation of the human mind, with its freely invented ideas and concepts. Physical theories try to form a picture of reality and to establish its connection with the wide world of sense impressions. Thus the only justification for our mental structures is whether and in what way our theories form such a link. (p. 310)
With the help of physical theories we try to find our way through the maze of observed facts, to order and understand the world of our sense impressions. We want the observed facts to follow logically from our concept of reality. Without the belief that it is possible to grasp the reality with our theoretical constructions, without the belief in the inner harmony of our world, there could be no science. This belief is and always will remain the fundamental motive for all scientific creation. Throughout all our efforts, in every dramatic struggle between old and new views, we recognize the eternal longing for understanding, the ever-firm belief in the harmony of our world, continually strengthened by the increasing obstacles to comprehension. (p. 312-313)
Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html#Ch1-S1
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning
When you treat things as if they were people, the result is myth: light is from the sun god, rain from the sky god, natural disasters from the clash of deities, and so on. Science was born when people stopped telling stories about nature and instead observed it; when, in short, they relinquished myth. (p. 3)
Edward O. Wilson
The Meaning of Human Existence
Although the two great branches of learning, science and the humanities, are radically different in the way they describe our species, they have risen from the same wellspring of creative thought. (p. 35)
Jacob Bronowski
Science and Human Values
The world which the human mind knows and explores does not survive if it is emptied of thought. And thought does not survive without symbolic concepts. The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry. We are as helpless today to define mass, fundamentally, as Newton was. But we do not therefore think, and neither did he, that the equations which contain mass as an unknown are mere rules of thumb. If we had been content with that view, we should never have learned to turn mass into energy. In forming a concept of mass, in speaking the word, we begin a process of experiment and correction which is the creative search for truth. (p. 42)
Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld
The Evolution of Physics
Science is not and will never be a closed book. Every important advance brings new questions. Every development reveals, in the long run, new and deeper difficulties. (p. 308)
Science is not just a collection of laws, a catalogue of unrelated facts. It is a creation of the human mind, with its freely invented ideas and concepts. Physical theories try to form a picture of reality and to establish its connection with the wide world of sense impressions. Thus the only justification for our mental structures is whether and in what way our theories form such a link. (p. 310)
With the help of physical theories we try to find our way through the maze of observed facts, to order and understand the world of our sense impressions. We want the observed facts to follow logically from our concept of reality. Without the belief that it is possible to grasp the reality with our theoretical constructions, without the belief in the inner harmony of our world, there could be no science. This belief is and always will remain the fundamental motive for all scientific creation. Throughout all our efforts, in every dramatic struggle between old and new views, we recognize the eternal longing for understanding, the ever-firm belief in the harmony of our world, continually strengthened by the increasing obstacles to comprehension. (p. 312-313)
Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html#Ch1-S1
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning
When you treat things as if they were people, the result is myth: light is from the sun god, rain from the sky god, natural disasters from the clash of deities, and so on. Science was born when people stopped telling stories about nature and instead observed it; when, in short, they relinquished myth. (p. 3)
Edward O. Wilson
The Meaning of Human Existence
Although the two great branches of learning, science and the humanities, are radically different in the way they describe our species, they have risen from the same wellspring of creative thought. (p. 35)
Jacob Bronowski
Science and Human Values
The world which the human mind knows and explores does not survive if it is emptied of thought. And thought does not survive without symbolic concepts. The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry. We are as helpless today to define mass, fundamentally, as Newton was. But we do not therefore think, and neither did he, that the equations which contain mass as an unknown are mere rules of thumb. If we had been content with that view, we should never have learned to turn mass into energy. In forming a concept of mass, in speaking the word, we begin a process of experiment and correction which is the creative search for truth. (p. 42)