>>14384050>what actually is science?Science is man's attempt to model a physical reality that we can't actually know.
>is it just a philosophical theory of how to understand physical objects outside of the mind? Kind of yeah, but I think saying "just a..." diminishes it's achievements and it's difficulties.
>Havent people been doing science for thousands of years?Sort of. Back with ancient Greeks, they tried tondo science by using pure reason, but their reasoning was often faulty. It wasn't until around the 16th century (think Bacon and Galileo) that people started to test their ideas against experimentation. This difference in approach is why Aristotle thought that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones, but Galileo knew that wasn't true. And it was around this time, when people started to use a mythological approach to validating ideas, that science as we know it really started to form.
It is kind of strange that this step seemingly took so long to develop, I've never really understood why.
>Why do we worship 17th - 20th century scientists in our culture?See above, it's the people that lived in that time frame that developed the current understanding of what science is.
