- systematic study of the natural world through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and theory
- the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, predict, test, replicate, revise
- branches: physics (matter, energy, gravity, waves), chemistry (atoms, molecules, reactions), biology (life, evolution, genetics), earth sciences (geological time, climate)
- formal sciences: mathematics, logic, statistics → the language of scientific reasoning
- emerged from philosophy in ancient Greece, formalized during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution
- key principles: falsifiability (Popper), paradigm shifts (Kuhn), reproducibility, peer review
- the printing press and scholarly journals enabled cumulative, distributed knowledge building
- the Information Age transformed science: computational modeling, big data, open access, preprints
- cyber extends scientific infrastructure: consensus-verified knowledge graphs as a substrate for machine and human science