I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
When the very first child asked “why” or tried to figure out how something worked, science began. 🙂
I suppose historians would tell you that it was when the scientific theory came into being. But I think science is just about curiosity and trying to figure out how the world works. In my experience, kids are better at that than adults. 🙂
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Oh, i thought that there was a huge lab explosion called “the big bang” and then there was science 😉
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Many would say, in a way correctly, that what we term science today stems from physics.
Technically astronomy, the study of stars and their relative location in the sky was what started it all.
Ask anyone in physics and they can go on, and on, and on 😛
Ultimately, science is the study of why! And there are a lot of “why” questions out there.
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Hi @phoebe – this is a fantastic and enormous question – one which we do not accurately know the answer to. We speculate and create theories based on evidence from historical records demonstrating the use of the scientific process (scientific enquiry/ asking questions, forming theories, problem solving, creating tools, etc) from ancient cultures and our ancestors.
Our idea/concept of science as we know it today has evolved from the process that our ancestors applied in the past, that helped them survive and pass on these qualities to the next generation. Knowing more about your environment, helps you to navigate obstacles and challenges and creates opportunities to learn… that will always happen!
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Science is a human concept which describes our effort to understand nature based on evidence rather than belief. We do this using a rigorous method known fittingly as ‘The Scientific Method’. Here is a great wikipedia entry about the history of the scientific method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_history_of_scientific_method
Science didn’t really have a beginning but you could think of it as a long battle between evidence vs belief. One of the most significant steps in this battle was lead by a guy called Nicolaus Copernicus back in the 1400s. Nicolaus discovered that the Earth revolves around the Sun, not vice versa. He demonstrated this by showing that the observed motions of stars and the sun could be explained really well without putting the Earth at the centre of the universe. This was hard for people to accept because they believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe. However, evidence showed otherwise. These days the same battle is being fought by evolutionary biologists and people who believe in intelligent design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design).
However, beliefs are important in science too! An important step in the scientific method is to first create a hypothesis (or a belief) about something which is not yet based on evidence. Then the hypothesis is tested using experiments. The key difference is that a scientist is someone who will change their beliefs if the evidence doesn’t support them. So you might say that science started when people first started to trade belief for evidence.
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