English Axolapedia

Science

The Plimpton 322 tablet by the Babylonians records Pythagorean triples, written c. 1800 BCE

Science is an ancient but still experimentally alive form of human activity that stubbornly tries to take a completely unruly Universe and force it to behave in a way that can be written down in tables, plotted on graphs, and presented as if it was all planned from the very beginning. It collects observations like a child gathering strange stones from the edge of reality, then labels them hypotheses and throws them at the Universe with the question: “is this true?”, after which the Universe usually stays silent or does something slightly different.

Over time, humanity decided that science could be classified as if it were a set of departments in a very unusual supermarket. In the natural sciences, everything is placed that stubbornly exists regardless of human opinion and has not signed any cooperation agreements. Social sciences deal with beings that constantly change the rules whenever the rules are explained to them, and sometimes even pretend that the previous rules were just a joke. Formal sciences — logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science — have completely abandoned reality and live in their own perfectly ordered universe, where everything works as long as one believes in the axioms strongly enough. There are also applied sciences — a kind of translators between “perfect in theory” and “somehow exploded in reality.” They take elegant abstractions and try to turn them into something useful in engineering, medicine, or other fields where it is preferable that the result does not behave like a surprise in a box. Historically, science did not appear suddenly — it developed slowly, like a very gradual intellectual update of humanity. As early as the Bronze Age in Egypt and Mesopotamia, people were already trying to organize mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, although it mostly resembled an attempt to understand the world through observation, intuition, and the principle of “let’s try this as well.”

Later, Greek natural philosophy introduced a radical idea: that phenomena might have causes, rather than simply “it happened because the gods were in the mood.” Medieval scholarship continued this line and began systematizing knowledge as if assembling a manual for the Universe without having the original box.Then came technological “updates,” including the Indo-Arabic numeral system — one of the few upgrades that genuinely improved human productivity, allowing people to count things faster than those things manage to become more complicated.

As a result, science became a global system that continuously tries to explain the Universe, even while suspecting that the Universe sometimes changes the rules of the game without patch notes. But this does not stop it: it simply refines definitions, adds uncertainties, and continues acting as if the next model version will finally account for everything.

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