Science is our most potent invention because it has given us a method to keep reinventing it. All our collective knowledge and expertise (that’s science) began with relatively simple arrangements of information. The simplest organization was the invention of the fact. Facts became codified not by science, but by the European legal system in the 1500s. In court lawyers had to establish agreed-upon observations as evidence that could not shift later. Science adopted this useful innovation. Over time, the novel ways in which knowledge could be ordered increased. This complex apparatus for determining the factual correctness of information, and relating it to old knowledge, is what we call science.
The scientific method is not one uniform “method.” It is a collection of scores of techniques and processes that has evolved over centuries (and continues to evolve). ...
