In the category of random thoughts…

I came across a statement on a completely unrelated Web site yesterday to the effect that the success of science is due to asking questions of Nature rather than asking questions of people. If you ask people a question about Nature (“does a heavier body fall faster than a light one?”), you’ll get a variety of changeable answers. But if you ask the question of Nature, you will get a consistent answer (in this case, “No”).

People had asked each other this question for thousands of years, with all kinds of answers (mostly wrong). When Galileo finally asked Nature, the question was answered once and for all.

Once you start asking questions like that, one question leads to another, and before you know it, you end up with modern science.

So a good definition of what science is might be “a systematic method of asking questions  of Nature”.