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What is science????
The word “science” probably brings to mind many different pictures: a fat textbook,
white lab coats and microscopes, an astronomer peering through a telescope, a
naturalist in the rainforest, Einstein’s equations scribbled on a chalkboard, the launch
of the space shuttle, bubbling beakers …. All of those images reflect some aspect of
science, but none of them provides a full picture because science has so many facets:

These images all show an aspect of science, but a complete view of science is more than any particular instance.

• Science is both a body of knowledge and a process. In school, science may

sometimes seem like a collection of isolated and static facts listed in a textbook,
but that’s only a small part of the story. Just as importantly, science is also a
process of discovery that allows us to link isolated facts into coherent and
comprehensive understandings of the natural world.
• Science is exciting. Science is a way of discovering what’s in the universe and
how those things work today, how they worked in the past, and how they are
likely to work in the future. Scientists are motivated by the thrill of seeing or
figuring out something that no one has before.
• Science is useful. The knowledge generated by science is powerful and reliable.
It can be used to develop new technologies, treat diseases, and deal with many
other sorts of problems.
• Science is ongoing. Science is continually refining and expanding our knowledge
of the universe, and as it does, it leads to new questions for future investigation.
Science will never be “finished.”
• Science is a global human endeavor. People all over the world participate in
the process of science. And you can too!

Diver photo provided by OAR/National Undersea Research Program (NURP); lab photo courtesy of Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory; photo of geologists on volcano by J.D. Griggs; photo of scientist in corn field by Scott Bauer; image of Mars
rover courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Discovery: The spark for science…
“Eureka!” or “aha!” moments
may not happen frequently, but
they are often experiences that
drive science and scientists. For
a scientist, every day holds the
possibility of discovery—of
coming up with a brand new
idea or of observing something
that no one has ever seen before. Vast
bodies of knowledge have yet to be built and many of the most basic questions about
the universe have yet to be answered:
• What causes gravity?
• How do tectonic plates move around on Earth’s surface?
• How do our brains store memories?
• How do water molecules interact with each other?
We don’t know the complete answers to these and an overwhelming number of other
questions, but the prospect of answering them beckons science forward.

EVERYDAY SCIENCE QUESTIONS

Scientific questions can seem complex
(e.g., what chemical reactions allow cells
to break the bonds in sugar molecules),
but they don’t have to be. You’ve probably
posed many perfectly valid scientific
questions yourself: how can airplanes fly,
why do cakes rise in the oven, why do
apples turn brown once they’re cut? You
can discover the answers to many of
these “everyday” science questions in
your local library, but for others, science
may not
have the answers yet, and answering such questions can lead to astonishing new
discoveries. For example, we still don’t know much about how your brain
remembers to buy milk at the grocery store. Just as we’re motivated to answer
questions about our everyday experiences, scientists confront such questions at all
scales, including questions about the very nature of the universe.

Discoveries, new questions, and new ideas are what keep scientists going and
awake at night, but they are only one part of the picture; the rest involves a lot
of hard (and sometimes tedious) work. In science, discoveries and ideas must be
verified by multiple lines of evidence and then integrated into the rest of science,
a process which can take many years. And often, discoveries are not bolts from
the blue. A discovery may itself be the result of many years of work on a
particular problem, as illustrated by Henrietta Leavitt’s stellar discovery …

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Photo of Spiral Galaxy M81 provided by NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); photo of water
provided by Andrew Davidhazy.

STELLAR SURPRISES
Astronomers had long known about the existence of
variable stars—stars whose brightness changes over time,
slowly shifting between brilliant and dim—when, in 1912,
Henrietta Leavitt announced a remarkable (and totally
unanticipated) discovery about them. For these stars, the
length of time between their brightest and dimmest points
seemed to be related to their overall brightness: slower
cycling stars are more luminous. At the time, no one knew
why that was the case, but nevertheless, the discovery allowed astronomers
Henrietta Leavitt
to infer the distances to far-off stars, and hence, to figure out the
size of our own galaxy. Leavitt’s observation was a true surprise—a discovery in
the classic sense—but one that came only after she’d spent years carefully
comparing thousands of photos of these specks of light, looking for patterns in the
darkness.
The process of scientific discovery is not limited to professional scientists working in
labs. The everyday experience of deducing that your car won’t start because of a bad
fuel pump, or of figuring out that the centipedes in your backyard prefer shady rocks
shares fundamental similarities with classically scientific discoveries like working out
DNA’s double helix. These activities all involve making observations and analyzing
evidence—and they all provide the satisfaction of finding an answer that makes sense
of all the facts. In fact, some psychologists argue that the way individual humans
learn (especially as children) bears a lot of similarity to the progress of science: both
involve making observations, considering evidence, testing ideas, and holding on to
those that work.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Photo of Henrietta Leavitt provided by the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO).

A science checklist
So what, exactly, is science? Well, science turns out to be difficult to define precisely.
(Philosophers have been arguing about it for decades!) The problem is that the term
“science” applies to a remarkably broad set of human endeavors, from developing
lasers, to analyzing the factors that affect human decision-making.
To get a grasp on what science is, we’ll look at a checklist that summarizes key
characteristics of science and compare it to a prototypical case of science in action:
Ernest Rutherford’s investigation into the structure of the atom. Then, we’ll look at
some other cases that are less “typical” examples of science to see how they measure
up and what characteristics they share.
This checklist provides a guide for what sorts of activities are encompassed by
science, but since the boundaries of science are not clearly defined, the list should not
be interpreted as all-or-nothing. Some of these characteristics are particularly
important to science (e.g., all of science must ultimately rely on evidence), but others
are less central. For example, some perfectly scientific investigations may run into a
dead end and not lead to ongoing research. Use this checklist as a reminder of the
usual features of science. If something doesn’t meet most of these characteristics, it
shouldn’t be treated as science.
Science asks questions about the
natural world
Science studies the natural world. This in-
cludes the components of the physical
universe around us like atoms, plants, eco-
systems, people, societies and galaxies, as
well as the natural forces at work on those
things. In contrast, science cannot study su-
pernatural forces and explanations. For ex-
ample, the idea that a supernatural afterlife
exists is not a part of science since this af-
terlife operates outside the rules that govern
the natural world.

Anything in the natural world—from exotic ecosystems to urban smog—can be the

subject of scientific inquiry.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Cococino National Forest photo by Gerald and Buff Corsi © California Academy of Sciences; Jupiter photo by
NASA/JPL/ Space Science Institute; photo of smoggy skyline by EPA; fungus photo by Dr. Robert Thomas and
Dorothy B. Orr © California Academy of Sciences.

Science can investigate all sorts of questions:

• When did the oldest rocks on earth form?
• Through what chemical reactions do fungi get energy from the nutrients they
absorb?
• What causes Jupiter’s red spot?
• How does smog move through the atmosphere?
Very few questions are off-limits in science—but the sorts of answers science can
provide are limited. Science can only answer in terms of natural phenomena and
natural processes. When we ask ourselves questions like, What is the meaning of
life? and Does the soul exist? we generally expect answers that are outside of the
natural world—and hence, outside of science.

A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND

THE ATOM
In the early 1900s, Ernest Rutherford studied (among
other things) the organization of the atom—the
fundamental particle of the natural world. Though atoms
cannot be seen with the naked eye, they can be studied
with the tools of science since they are part of the natural
world.
Rutherford’s story continues as we examine each item on
the Science Checklist. To find out how this investigation
measures up against the rest of the checklist, read on.
Ernest Rutherford

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Rutherford photo from the Library of Congress.

Science aims to explain and understand

Science as a collective institution aims to
produce more and more accurate natural
explanations of how the natural world works,
what its components are, and how the world
got to be the way it is now. Classically,
science’s main goal has been building
knowledge and understanding, regardless of
its potential applications—for example,
investigating the chemical reactions that an
organic compound undergoes in order to
learn about its structure. However,
increasingly, scientific research is undertaken
with the explicit goal of solving a problem or
developing a technology, and along the path
to that goal, new knowledge and explanations
are constructed. For example, a chemist
might try to produce an antimalarial drug
synthetically and in the process, discover new methods of forming
bonds that can be applied to making other chemicals. Either way (so-called “pure” or
“applied” research), science aims to increase our understanding of how the natural
world works.
The knowledge that is built by science is always open
to question and revision. No scientific idea is ever
once-and-for-all “proved.” Why not? Well, science is
constantly seeking new evidence, which could reveal
problems with our current understandings. Ideas that
we fully accept today may be rejected or modified in
light of new evidence discovered tomorrow. For exam-
A coelacanth ple, up until 1938, paleontologists accepted the idea
that coelacanths (an ancient fish) went extinct at the time that they last appear in the
fossil record—about 80 million years ago. But that year, a live coelacanth was
discovered off the coast of South Africa, causing scientists to revise their ideas and
begin to investigate how this animal survives in the deep sea.
Despite the fact that they are subject to change, scientific ideas are reliable. The ideas
that have gained scientific acceptance have done so because they are supported by
many lines of evidence. These scientific explanations continually generate
expectations that hold true, allowing us to figure out how entities in the natural world
are likely to behave (e.g., how likely it is that a child will inherit a particular genetic
disease) and how we can harness that understanding to solve problems (e.g., how
electricity, wire, glass, and various compounds can be fashioned into a working light
bulb). For example, scientific understandings of motion and gases allow us to build
airplanes that reliably get us from one airport to the next. Though the knowledge
used to design airplanes is technically provisional, time and time again, that
knowledge has allowed us to produce airplanes that fly. We have good reason to trust
scientific ideas: they work!

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM

Ernest Rutherford’s investigations were aimed at understanding a small, but illu-
minating, corner of the natural world: the atom. He investigated this world using
alpha particles, which are helium atoms stripped of their electrons. Rutherford
had found that when a beam of these tiny, positively-charged alpha particles is
fired through gold foil, the particles don’t stay on their beeline course, but are de-
flected (or “scattered”) at different angles. Rutherford wanted to figure out what
this might tell him about the layout of an atom.

Rutherford’s story continues as we examine each item on the Science Checklist.

To find out how this investigation measures up against the rest of the checklist,
read on.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Science works with testable ideas
Only testable ideas are within the purview of
science. For an idea to be testable, it must
logically generate specific expectations— in
other words, a set of observations that we
could expect to make if the idea were true
and a set of observations that would be
inconsistent with the idea and lead you to
believe that it is not true. For example,
consider the idea that a sparrow’s song is
genetically encoded and is unaffected by the
environment in which it is raised, in
comparison to the idea that a sparrow learns
the song it hears as a baby. Logical
reasoning about this example leads to a
specific set of expectations. If the sparrow’s
song were indeed genetically encoded, we
would expect that a sparrow raised in the
nest of a different species would grow up to sing a
sparrow song like any other member of its own species. But if, instead, the sparrow’s
song were learned as a chick, raising a sparrow in the nest of another species should
produce a sparrow that sings a non-sparrow song. Because they generate different
expected observations, these ideas are testable. A scientific idea may require a lot of
reasoning to work out an appropriate test, may be difficult to test, may require the
development of new technological tools to test, or may require one to make
independently testable assumptions to test—but to be scientific, an idea must be
testable, somehow, someway.

If an explanation is equally compatible with all possible observations, then it is not

testable and hence, not within the reach of science. This is frequently the case with
ideas about supernatural entities. For example, consider the idea that an all-powerful
supernatural being controls our actions. Is there anything we could do to test that

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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idea? No. Because this supernatural being is all-powerful, anything we observe could
be chalked up to the whim of that being. Or not. The point is that we can’t use the
tools of science to gather any information about whether or not this being exists—so
such an idea is outside the realm of science.

A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM

Before 1910, Ernest Rutherford and many other
scientists had the idea that the positive charge and the
mass of an atom were evenly distributed throughout the
whole atom, with electrons scattered throughout. You
can imagine this model of the atom as a loosely packed
snowball (the positive mass of the atom) with a few tiny
grains of sand (the electrons) scattered throughout. The
idea that atoms are arranged in this way can be tested
by firing an alpha particle beam through a piece of gold
foil. If the idea were correct, then the positive mass in
the gold foil would be relatively diffuse (the loosely
packed snow) and would allow the alpha particles to
pass through the foil with only minor scattering.
Rutherford’s story continues as we examine each item on the Science Checklist. To
find out how this investigation measures up against the rest of the checklist, read
on.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Science relies on evidence
Ultimately, scientific ideas must not only be
testable, but must actually be tested—
preferably with many different lines of
evidence by many different people. This
characteristic is at the heart of all science.
Scientists actively seek evidence to test their
ideas—even if the test is difficult and means,
for example, spending years working on a
single experiment, traveling to Antarctica to
measure carbon dioxide levels in an ice core,
or collecting DNA samples from thousands of
volunteers all over the world. Performing
such tests is so important to science because
in science, the acceptance or rejection of a
scientific idea depends upon the evidence
relevant to it—not upon dogma, popular
opinion, or tradition. In science, ideas that
are not supported by evidence are ultimately rejected. And
ideas that are protected from testing or are only allowed to be tested by one group
with a vested interest in the outcome are not a part of good science.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM

Ernest Rutherford’s lab tested the idea that an atom’s positive mass is
spread out diffusely by firing an alpha particle beam through a piece of gold foil, but
the evidence resulting from that experiment was a complete surprise: most of the
alpha particles passed through the gold foil without changing direction much as
expected, but some of the alpha particles came bouncing back in the opposite
direction, as though they had struck something dense and solid in the gold foil. If
the gold atoms were really like loosely packed snowballs, all of the alpha particles
should have passed through the foil, but they did not!
From this evidence, Rutherford
concluded that their snowball model of
the atom had been incorrect, even
though it was popular with many other
scientists. Instead, the evidence
suggested that an atom is mostly
empty space and that its positive
charge is concentrated in a dense
mass at its core, forming a nucleus.
When the positively charged alpha
particles were fired at the gold foil,
most of them passed through the
empty space of the gold atoms with
little deflection, but a few of them ran
smack into the dense, positively
charged nucleus of a gold atom and
were repelled straight back (like what
would happen if you tried to make the
north poles of two strong magnets touch). The idea that atoms have positively
charged nuclei was also testable. Many independent experiments were performed
by other researchers to see if the idea fit with other experimental results.
Rutherford’s story continues as we examine each item on the Science Checklist. To
find out how this investigation measures up against the rest of the checklist, read
on.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Science is embedded in the scientific
community
The progress of science depends on
interactions within the scientific community—
that is, the community of people and
organizations that generate scientific ideas,
test those ideas, publish scientific journals,
organize conferences, train scientists,
distribute research funds, etc. This scientific
community provides the cumulative
knowledge base that allows science to build
on itself. It is also responsible for the further
testing and scrutiny of ideas and for
performing checks and balances on the work
of community members.
In addition, much scientific research is
collaborative, with different people bringing
their specialized knowledge to bear on
different aspects of the problem. For example, a
2006 journal article on regional variations in
the human genome was the result of a collaboration between 43 people from the U.K.,
Japan, the U.S., Canada, and Spain! Even Charles Darwin, who initially investigated
the idea of evolution through natural selection while living almost as a hermit at his
country estate, kept up a lively correspondence with his peers, sending and receiving
numerous letters dealing with his ideas and the evidence relevant to them.
In rare cases, scientists do actually work
in isolation. Gregor Mendel, for example,
figured out the basic principles of
genetic inheritance as a secluded monk
with very little scientific interaction.
However, even in such cases, research
must ultimately involve the scientific
community if that work is to have any
impact on the progress of science. In
Mendel’s case, the ultimate involvement
of the scientific community through his
published work was critical because it
allowed other scientists to evaluate
those ideas independently, investigate
new lines of evidence, and develop
extensions of his ideas. This community
process may be chaotic and slow, but it
is also crucial to the progress of science.
Scientists sometimes work alone and sometimes work
together, but communication within the scientific
community is always important.

A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM

Though Ernest Rutherford came up with
the idea that atoms have positively
charged nuclei, the research that led to
this idea was a collaborative effort:
Rutherford was assisted by Hans Geiger,
and the critical alpha-scattering

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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experiment was actually carried out by
Ernest Marsden, an undergraduate
student working in Rutherford’s lab.
Furthermore, after his discovery of the
Ernest Rutherford (right) and Hans Geiger
layout of the atom, Rutherford published in the physics laboratory at Manchester a
description of the idea and the relevant University, England, circa 1912. Permission
evidence, releasing it to the scientific of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington,
community for scrutiny and evaluation. New Zealand, must be obtained before any re-use
of this image. Reference number: And scrutinize they did. Niels Bohr no- PAColl-0091-1-
011. ticed a problem with Rutherford’s idea:
there was nothing keeping the orbiting electrons from spiraling into the nucleus of
the atom, causing the whole thing to collapse! Bohr modified Rutherford’s basic
model by proposing that electrons had set energy levels, which helped solve the
problem and earned Bohr a Nobel Prize. Since then, many other scientists have
built on and modified Bohr’s model.

Lithium atoms, diagrammed in the Rutherford and

Bohr models. Rutherford’s model does not
differentiate between any of the electrons, while
Bohr’s places electrons into orbits with set energy
levels.

Rutherford’s story continues as we examine each item on the Science Checklist. To

find out how this investigation measures up against the rest of the checklist, read
on.

Scientific ideas lead to ongoing research

Science is an ongoing endeavor. It did not
end with the most recent edition of your
college physics textbook and will not end
even once we know the answers to big
questions, such as how our 20,000 genes
interact to build a human being or what dark
matter is. So long as there are unexplored
and unexplained parts of the natural world,
science will continue to investigate them.
Most typically in science, answering one
question inspires deeper and more detailed
questions for further research. Similarly,
coming up with a fruitful idea to explain a
previously anomalous observation frequently
leads to new expectations and areas of
research. So, in a sense, the more we know,
the more we know what we don’t yet know. As our knowledge expands, so too does
our awareness of what we don’t yet understand. For example, James Watson and
Francis Crick’s proposal that DNA takes the form of a double helix helped answer a
burning question in biology about the chemical structure of DNA. And while it helped

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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answer one question, it also generated new expectations (e.g., that DNA is copied
via base pairing), raised many new questions (e.g., how does DNA store
information?), and contributed to whole new fields of research (e.g., genetic
engineering). Like Watson and Crick’s work, most scientific research generates new
expectations, inspires new questions, and leads to new discoveries.

A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM

Niels Bohr built upon Ernest Rutherford’s work to
develop the model of the atom most commonly
portrayed in textbooks: a nucleus orbited by electrons
at different levels. Despite the new questions it raised
(e.g., how do orbiting electrons avoid violating the rules
of electricity and magnetism when they don’t spiral into
the nucleus?), this model was powerful and, with
further modification, led to a wide range of accurate
predictions and new discoveries: from predicting the
outcome of chemical reactions, to determining the
composition of distant stars, to conceiving of the atomic
bomb.
Niels Bohr

Rutherford’s story continues as we examine each item on the Science Checklist. To

find out how this investigation measures up to the last item of the checklist, read
on.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Participants in science behave scientifically

elite endeavor in which one has to be a

member of “the club” in order to be taken
seriously. That’s a bit misleading. In fact, sci-
ence is now open to anyone (regardless of
age, gender, religious commitment, physical
ability, ethnicity, country of origin, political
views, nearsightedness, favorite ice cream
flavor—whatever!) and benefits tremendous-
ly from the expanding diversity of perspec-
tives offered by its participants. However,
science only works because the people in-
volved with it behave “scientifically”—that is,
behave in ways that push science forward.

Science is sometimes misconstrued as an

But what exactly does one have to do to behave scientifically? Here is a scientist’s
code of conduct:
1) Pay attention to what other people have already done. Scientific knowledge
is built cumulatively. If you want to discover exciting new things, you need to
know what people have already discovered before you. This means that scientists
study their fields extensively to understand the current state of knowledge.
2) Expose your ideas to testing. Strive to describe and perform the tests that
might suggest you are wrong and/or allow others to do so. This may seem like
shooting yourself in the foot but is critical to the progress of science. Science
aims to accurately understand the world, and if ideas are protected from testing,
it’s impossible to figure out if they are accurate or inaccurate!

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3) Assimilate the evidence. Evidence is the ultimate arbiter of scientific ideas.
Scientists are not free to ignore evidence. When faced with evidence
contradicting his or her idea, a scientist may suspend judgment on that idea
pending more tests, may revise or reject the idea, or may consider alternate
ways to explain the evidence, but ultimately, scientific ideas are sustained by
evidence and cannot be propped up if the evidence tears them down.
4) Openly communicate ideas and tests to others. Communication is important
for many reasons. If a scientist keeps knowledge to her- or himself, others
cannot build upon those ideas, double-check the work, or devise new ways to
test the ideas.
5) Play fair: Act with scientific integrity. Hiding evidence, selectively reporting
evidence, and faking data directly thwart science’s main goal—to construct
accurate knowledge about the natural world. Hence, maintaining high standards
of honesty, integrity, and objectivity is critical to science.

A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM

Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues acted in ways that moved science forward:
• They understood the relevant knowledge in their field. Rutherford had studied
physics for more than 20 years when he proposed the idea of the nucleus.
• They exposed their ideas to testing. Even though his original view of the atom
suggested that no backscattering should occur, Rutherford decided to look for
backscattered alpha particles anyway, just to be thorough.
• They assimilated the evidence. When their experimental results did not
support the “snowball” model of the atom, instead of writing those results off
as an anomaly, they modified their original ideas in light of the new evidence.
• They openly communicated their ideas so that other physicists could test them
as well. Rutherford published the experimental results, a description of his
reasoning, and the idea of the nucleus in 1911 in a scientific journal.
• They acted with scientific integrity. In his paper on the topic, Rutherford
assigned credit fairly (citing the contributions of his colleagues, Geiger and
Marsden) and reported his results honestly—even when experimental results
and his theoretical calculations did not match up perfectly.
The scientists involved with this investigation lived up to the five points in the
scientist’s code of conduct. In this way—and judging by the other items on the
Science Checklist—this investigation of atomic structure is well within the purview
of science.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Beyond physics, chemistry, and biology
We’ve seen that scientific research generally
meets a set of key characteristics: it focuses
on improving our understanding of the
natural world, works with testable ideas that
can be verified with evidence, relies on the
scientific community, inspires ongoing
research, and is performed by people who
behave scientifically. While not all scientific
investigations line up perfectly with the
Science Checklist, science, as an endeavor,
strives to embody these features. Ernest
Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus,
for example, satisfied those characteristics
quite neatly. But how would a less
stereotypically “scientific” investigation—one
that wouldn’t show up in a high school
science textbook— measure up against the
Science Checklist? To find out, we’ll look at an example from the field of psychology …
Beyond the prototype: Animal psychology
Most of us have probably wondered how other animals think and experience the world
(e.g, is Fido really happy to see me or does he just want a treat?)—but can that
curiosity be satisfied by science? After all, how could we ever test an idea about how
another animal thinks? In the 1940s, psychologist Edward Tolman investigated a
related question using the methods of science. He wanted to know how rats
successfully navigate their surroundings—for example, a maze containing a hidden
reward. Tolman suspected that rats would build mental maps of the maze as they
investigated it (forming a mental picture of the layout of the maze), but many of his
colleagues thought that rats would learn to navigate the maze through stimulus-
response, associating particular cues with particular outcomes (e.g., taking this tunnel
means I get a piece of cheese) without forming any big picture of the maze.

Here’s how Tolman’s investigation measures up against our checklist:

Natural world?
The brains of rats and their workings are a part of the natural world, as is the
behavior of rats.
Aims to explain?
Tolman aimed to explain how rats navigate their surroundings.
Testable ideas?
The two ideas about how rats navigate (mental maps vs. stimulus-response) are
testable, but figuring out how to test them required some clever and logical thinking
about experimental design. To test these ideas, Tolman and his colleagues trained rats
in a maze which offered them many different tunnels to enter first. One of the tunnels

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twisted and turned but consistently led to the reward, and the rats quickly learned to
go down that tunnel. Then the experimenters blocked the entrance to the reward
tunnel. What would the rats do? Tolman reasoned that if the rats were navigating with
a mental map, they would pick another tunnel that, according to their mental map of
the maze, led in the direction of the food. But if the rats were navigating via
stimulusresponse, Tolman reasoned that they would choose the tunnel closest to the
original reward tunnel, regardless of where it led, since that was closest to the
stimulus with the pay-off.
Relies on evidence?
Tolman and his colleagues tested the mental map idea with several experiments,
including the tunnel experiment described above. In that experiment, they found that
most of the rats picked a tunnel that led in the direction of the food, instead of one
close to the original reward tunnel. The evidence supported the idea that rats navigate
using something like a mental map.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Scientific community?
Tolman published many papers on this topic in scientific journals in order to explain
his experiments and the evidence relevant to them to other psychologists.
Ongoing research?
This research is a small part of a much larger body of ongoing psychological research
about how organisms learn and make decisions based on their representations of the
world.
Scientific behavior?
Edward Tolman and his colleagues acted with scientific integrity and behaved in ways
that push science forward. They accurately reported their results and allowed others
to test their ideas.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Science in disguise
Our Science Checklist fits well with a wide range of
investigations—from developing an Alzheimer’s drug, to
dissecting the structure of atoms, to probing the neurology of
human emotion. Even endeavors far from one’s typical picture
of science, like figuring out how best to teach English as a
second language or examining the impact of a government
deficit on the economy, can be addressed by science.
Disguised as science
However, other human endeavors, which might at first seem
Teaching is an example of a
challenge that can be
like science, are actually not very much like science at all. For
addressed by science.
example, the Intelligent Design movement promotes the idea
that many aspects of life are too complex to have evolved
without the intervention of an intelligent cause—assumed by most proponents to be a
supernatural being, like God. Promoters of this idea are interested in explaining what
we observe in the natural world (the features of living things), which does align well
with the aims of science. However, because Intelligent Design relies on the action of
an unspecified “intelligent cause,” it is not a testable idea. Furthermore, the
movement itself has several other characteristics that reveal it to be non-science.
Western astrology aims to explain and predict events on Earth in terms of the
positions of the sun, planets, and constellations; hence, like science, astrology focuses
on explaining the natural world. However, in many other ways, astrology is not much
like science at all.

Western astrology is not science.

Science has limits: A few things that science

does not do
Science is powerful. It has generated the knowledge that allows us to call a friend
halfway around the world with a cell phone, vaccinate a baby against polio, build a
skyscraper, and drive a car. And science helps us answer important questions like
which areas might be hit by a tsunami after an earthquake, how did the hole in the
ozone layer form, how can we protect our crops from pests, and who were our
evolutionary ancestors? With such breadth, the reach of science might seem to be
endless, but it is not. Science has definite limits. Science doesn’t make moral
judgments
When is euthanasia the right thing to do?
What universal rights should humans
have? Should other animals have rights?
Questions like these are important, but
scientific research will not answer them.
Science can help us learn about terminal
illnesses and the history of human and
animal rights— and that knowledge can inform our opinions and decisions. But
ultimately, individual people must make moral judgments. Science helps us describe

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
 21
how the world is, but it cannot make any judgments about whether that state of
affairs is right, wrong, good, or bad.
Science doesn’t make aesthetic
judgments
Science can reveal the frequency of a
G-flat and how our eyes relay
information about color to our brains,
but science cannot tell us whether a
Beethoven symphony, a Kabuki
performance, or a Jackson Pollock
painting is beautiful or dreadful. Individuals make those decisions for themselves
based on their own aesthetic criteria.
Science doesn’t tell you how to use
scientific knowledge
Although scientists often care deeply
about how their discoveries are used,
science itself doesn’t indicate what should
be done with scientific knowledge.
Science, for example, can tell you how to
recombine DNA in new ways, but it
doesn’t specify whether you
should use that knowledge to correct a genetic disease, develop a bruise-resistant
apple, or construct a new bacterium. For almost any important scientific advance, one
can imagine both positive and negative ways that knowledge could be used. Again,
science helps us describe how the world is, and then we have to decide how to use
that knowledge.
Science doesn’t draw conclusions
about supernatural explanations
Do gods exist? Do supernatural entities
intervene in human affairs? These
questions may be important, but science
won’t help you answer them. Questions
that deal with supernatural explanations
are, by definition, beyond the realm of
nature—
and hence, also beyond the realm of what can be studied by science. For many, such
questions are matters of personal faith and spirituality.
Moral judgments, aesthetic judgments, decisions about applications of science, and
conclusions about the supernatural are outside the realm of science, but that doesn’t
mean that these realms are unimportant. In fact, domains such as ethics, aesthetics,
and religion fundamentally influence human societies and how those societies interact
with science. Neither are such domains unscholarly. In fact, topics like aesthetics,
morality, and theology are actively studied by philosophers, historians, and other
scholars. However, questions that arise within these domains generally cannot be
resolved by science.

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org
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Science in sum
In this section, we’ve seen that, though
hard to define concisely, science has a
handful of key features that set it apart
from other areas of human knowledge.
However, the net cast by science is wide.
The Science Checklist matches up to a
diverse set of human endeavors—from
uncovering the fundamental particles of
the universe, to studying the mating
behavior of lobsters, to investigating the
effects of different economic policies.
We’ve also seen that science has limits:
some questions that are an important
part of the human experience are not
answerable within the context of science.
So science isn’t everything, but it is
important. Science helps us construct
knowledge about the natural world—knowledge that
can then be harnessed to improve our lives and solve problems. How does science do
it? To find out, read on …

© 2013 The University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and the Regents of the University of California • www.understandingscience.org