March for Science: What is science to me?

In honor of the March for Science which took place around the world, I’ve decided to share what science means to me, an eleven year old student. In general, science is our understanding and discovery of how the world works. Almost everything we know can be defined by science, how it works, what it is, why it does what it does.

Centuries ago, such as Ancient Greek times, people who didn’t understand science gave credit to their Gods. The Gods received blame for the bad things, and credit for the good things. Science will forever be a study, no matter whether one understands it or not. If, in a parallel universe, we didn’t recognize science, it would still be a way to describe that universe’s function.

Imagine a parallel universe that literally doesn’t have science. As in, science doesn’t exist. There are no states of matter, or laws of gravity. Big Bang? Nope. How would it have happened? What was it? Why did it happen? This universe would never know. Thankfully, today we’ve expanded our knowledge of science so much, and we don’t live in that kind of world. Most of our expanded knowledge stems back to discoveries in physics.

Physics is the most interesting and what I would like to call the main field of science, not to mention my favorite.  It, like science as a whole, can also describe almost all of our knowledge because science deals with the smallest things in the universe: particles. These particles make up every known thing on the Earth. That’s why science is so vast, it can get into all the little nooks and crannies of discovery.  Math rests on top of physics, as the primary tool of physics. I think of science as a pyramid. The base, the widest part, is the most important, the largest, the foundation. Physics is the bottom layer of stones on that scientific pyramid. Second-to-bottom, math, and from there, I haven’t learned.

Science can also, normally, explain what we call “coincidences”. Recall elementary, middle, and high school science (not that I have been to high school science yet but I can imagine). Did you ever stop to count the number of times your teachers said something along the lines of, “Did you know that blah blah blah (ßinsert noun describing a function in our world, i.e. ozone layer) blahs/ed blahs/ed blahs/ed (ßinsert verb subject, i.e. protects us) the blah blah blah (ßinsert noun, often of dangerous properties, i.e. from dangerous sun rays) so that we humans can survive”? Thinking out how to write that piece of dialogue was harder than it seems. But have you ever stopped to think of how many things had to go exactly right for us to survive and develop? Of course, science can’t explain something like identical twins leading identical lives (has happened before, look it up), but it can most others.

So, in synthesis, science is the basis of our understanding of the universe. It describes the universe’s function, stems from physics and can explain huge coincidences, such as Earth’s many necessary components needed for us to survive. In all, science is probably the most important study, but probably not the most used study. I’m still glad that people in the March for Science are marching to make us aware of the science’s importance.