According to Asimov, science is the systematic method of studying humankind's desire to know. Higher organisms are characterized by an innate need to explore their environment. The knowledge sought by these organisms range from the satisfaction of practical needs to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
The ancient Greeks, being the most advanced civilization in the ancient Western world, were the first to devise a system of established rules of reason to be applied to questions of science. The Greeks assumed that natural laws were immutable and comprehensible to the human mind: "With confidence in the fair play of nature, human beings needed to work out an orderly system for learning how to determine the underlying laws from the observed data." The Greeks, enamored of their geometric system of proofs, theorems, and axioms, turned to the process of deductive reasoning and searched for absolute truths.
Later, Galileo created a scientific revolution by demonstrating the superiority of inductive reasoning over deductive reasoning. Using the inductive method, scientists start with observations from which generalizations are derived. In the inductive method, there are no absolute truths. The inductive method is the cornerstone of modern science.
Another hallmark of modern science is the establishment of a cohesive scientific community. In the past, scientists worked in secrecy and sharing information with colleagues was rare. In the present, scientific discoveries are published in full detail. In fact, to be considered valid a new observation or discovery must be duplicated by another investigator.
Theories regarding the birth of the solar system are of two types: the catastrophic hypothesis and the evolutionary hypothesis. Basically, the catastrophic theory contends that the solar system was formed as a result of a singular event. One popular theory about the catastrophic creation of the solar system ...