What Is Science and How Do I Use This Website?

You may be wondering this, you may not be, but I'm going to explain anyway.

This website is to help anyone who wants to learn about science. It's a handy resource for students, teachers and people who want to learn or brush up on their knowledge about this fascinating subject.

So what is science?

Science is the study of nature. If you take a look in the mirror, you'll see your body. This was naturally formed by a biological process called reproduction, which went on inside your mother's body (unless you're some kind of secret experiment and you were born in a test tube). Biology is the study of living things: animals, plants, fungi and microbes (living things which are too small to see).

As well as biology, there are other branches of science that look into things that we don't consider living, like what we use to build stuff: metals, plastics, minerals etc. and things like planets and stars. Basically, anything and everything around you is included in our study of science.

Science is about the study of how and why things work. How does water become ice or steam? Why does the Earth go around the sun? How do trees grow? How does the food I eat affect me? These are some of the questions that scientists (people who study science) have asked and tried to answer. Scientists have found answers to many questions about our universe and are continuously searching for more knowledge about nature.

Since science is such a massive subject, we usually split it into these three areas:

Biology: The study of livings things, called organisms.

Chemistry: The study of the buildings blocks of everything, and how things react together to make other things.

Physics: The study of laws that every physical thing has to obey and also about forces and energy.

Don't worry too much if you're a bit lost at this point. As you go through the articles, you'll find that everything will begin to make sense. I believe, importantly, that anyone can learn and understand science so long as they are interested. You just need to take it one step at a time.

How do scientists find out things?

The way to find out how something works in real life, or even if it exists at all, is to obtain evidence. If you saw a fox running around in your back yard and told other people this, they might not believe you because it's unlikely. It's not as unlikely as an alien spaceship landing on your back yard, but it's less likely than your neighbour's cat or dog. So you can provide evidence to back up your claim that there's a fox. You could take photos of the fox or record a video, or you could convince them to follow you to your back yard and have a look. Once others have observed the fox, they can then be convinced of its existence and that you were giving them an accurate description of something in reality.

That's how science works.

Scientists also help others understand how things work and why things happen the way they do: what makes plants grow? How do our brains work? What causes rain to fall? Just as with the fox in the back yard, you need evidence. You need to make observations and show the evidence to others.

Experimentation is a good way to find out things. So if you hear that you can make steam by boiling water to 100 degrees Celsius, then you test it: heat up water in a container (you can use a saucepan) and keep an eye on its temperature with a thermometer. Then see what happens when the temperature reaches 100 degrees Celsius. With this experiment, you can learn that water indeed does boil at 100 degrees and you get steam coming off its surface. You've also tested what someone else has said and validated their findings. You can record what you have done and if other people agree that water does what you claim (by testing it for themselves), then it can be considered a scientific fact and the experimental results are evidence for this fact.

Facts and theories

A theory is the explanation for a fact. That's the way scientists use the term. So in our example with boiling water above, a theory would explain why water boils and steam comes off the surface of the water. I'm not going to get into what that explanation is right now; I'll cover it in another article.

Let's use another example with LEGO bricks:

If we imagine a small wall made with 8 LEGO bricks of the same type and size, then it's a fact that the bricks can be stacked together to build a wall. The theory would be the explanation for how that happens and would include describing the nobbly bits on one side of the brick and the gaps, or holes on the other side. We then explain that the bricks fit together by putting the nobbly bits (or protrusions) of one brick into the gaps of another brick.

So now we have our theory for LEGO bricks building a wall. Of course, in this example, LEGO bricks make a wall because humans put them together. It doesn't happen naturally. In science, we're usually interested in how things form naturally.

It will be easier to explain more about theories once you already know some scientific facts, so I'll leave it at that for now and we'll move on to discussing this website.

How do I use this website?

This is the first article of the site and is the best place for beginners to start their journey of discovery. This article is to be read from top to bottom but some other articles are more interesting.

The next stop on your journey will be 'Elementary, Dear Watson'. Start reading that article until you get to a bit that suggests you go to the article about atoms ('Up, Up 'n Atom!'). Just click the link to it, or find the article in the menu. So you start at elements, and then go to atoms to get the understanding you need to make sense of the rest of the article on elements. The reason I made it this way is because these two topics go together.

So sometimes you need to switch back and forth between different articles.

Another thing to understand about the articles, is that there are different levels to them. Different articles have varying levels and a single article can have higher levels as you read further along it. The levels are colour and number coded, as seen by a coloured number at certain points along the article (you'll always find the line and number in the top part of the article and there may be a higher level further down). They also roughly match certain levels of school education and I include the UK equivalents below:

1 Green: Beginner (pre-GCSE to GCSE)

2 Orange: Intermediate (GCSE)

3 Blue: Advanced (A Level)

4 Purple: Deep and sometimes cutting edge (undegraduate to postgraduate university)

If you're new to science, then I suggest you stick to the Green level. If you feel up to it, you can progress further to the other levels. Also, if you're interested in moving on, please don't let your school level stop you. It won't hurt to learn anything extra that you don't cover in school, so long as you check that you have a good understanding of what you need to know for your level in education.

Also, please note that I may not cover everything you're required to learn about a topic to pass your exams and do your coursework. Nor will I just stick to knowledge you gain in formal education (e.g. I may go past GCSE level in an Orange section of an article.)

The order of learning

As I said, this is the first article and then you go onto 'Elementary, Dear Watson' and 'Up, Up 'n Atom!'. I call these two articles, together with this one, the Starter Articles. After these you can then go into the different areas of science, starting with the Key Articles. These ones unlock the different articles in their group; in other words they introduce the different areas of science. From a Key Article, you can then understand enough to go into the other articles in the area. The diagram below shows what I mean:

As you can see, the names of the different areas of science are: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geology and Astronomy. The five Key Articles unlock these areas. All the articles are in their own groups, which you'll find on the homepage.

Geology and Astronomy? I thought there are only 3 branches?

Well yes there are, in the sense that studying these three branches will enable you to gain a certain fundamental level of understanding about the universe. But you can apply Physics, Chemistry and Biology to the study of the Earth and what makes it up (minerals and rocks, basically) which is Geology and you can also apply them to study space and everything in it, which is the subject called Astronomy. Scientists like to consider Geology and Astronomy as sciences of their own. There are other branches of science, but this website covers these 5.

A couple of final suggestions

The Key Articles are good background for everything else you'll read on this site. I don't mean just a Key Article for that subject, but the Key Articles for each of the five subjects will give you useful information for all other articles from all subjects. This is especially true for the Key Articles of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

Furthermore, I would highly recommend reading 'Let's Get Physical' and 'Chemical Bonding' first as it includes some basic things you need to know in order to understand science (please note that 'Chemical Bonding' is Orange, but you would have already read the Green articles for it which are the two Starter Articles after this one.)

So now you're ready to begin exploring Star Song Science! I hope you enjoy this website and learn lots. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me by pressing the Tell Me Your Thoughts button or by clicking any of the social media links.