If you ask me what science is, I’d say, science is the prediction of the future, and prediction is the way how science improves. In all ages, people try to use different methods to predict what will happen with given conditions. In early China and Ancient Greece, a great number of mantic practitioners tried to use their own methods to predict the future. Nowadays, though divination is almost proved to be inaccurate, I still consider it as an origin of science, in which people use existing materials to predict the future.
What science does is continuously trying to use a different method to predict the future, and generate a general rule that could make the most precise outcome. We could have some inaccurate models, but those models have all played an important rule in its era. With ether, we can explain many of the properties of lights; with Newton’s law, we can accurately explain almost all the regulations of motion of a macro object in a low gravity field. However, by proving the inaccuracy of ether, Newton’s law, and many old regulations, we later generated much more advanced theory, like relativity and quantum mechanics. Looking backward, the theories we used to believe right are almost outdated to our new world. Maybe the science we take pride in now will only be something useless as how we regard the ancient divination thousand years later. However, what important for us now, is to try out best on the way of making predictions and make contributions to the grand building of science.