by Science, what a beautiful word. It could be the study of how a ball rolls down a hill, the study of a how algae turns carbon dioxide into oxygen, or even the study of how humans socially interact, all of which would be considered a “science”. One can break down every scientific study to see what it involves, but any science will have one thing in common: it is the pursuit of precise knowledge. Knowledge essentially is knowing a trend that occurs and being able to predict what will happen based off this trend. A convenient word for this would be patterns. When something follows a pattern you can figure out what the next step in the sequence of events will be based simply off what has already happened. Science as a broad term is the study of patterns and their sub patterns, and how they may be applied to everyday life.
If we take a look at a common and relevant science, Biology, we can see how it involves pattern dissection. As an example, in high school biology, students learn the formula for photosynthesis, 6CO2+6H2O=C6H12O6+6O2, which was discovered by measuring the inputs and output chemicals of the reaction. Scientists noticed how every time plants engaged in photosynthesis the ratio of oxygen, water, and carbon would follow this pattern. So then when a scientist predicted that a plant with a certain mass of CO2 available would create this much oxygen, they could be confident that they were right because they used a past trend of results to predict how much oxygen would be produced.
Psychology, for example, is a science which has no numerical equations but still involves evaluations of patterns. When someone reacts to something a certain way a psychologist might assume it was a coincidence, but when that person or someone else reacts in a similar way, the scientist might now try to connect it to a reason. An example is the famous Little Albert experiment in 1920. At the time people understood that everyone has different fears and preferences, but not why some people liked what others feared. Dr. Watson predicted that previous experiences trained people to fear or like certain things. For the experiment he took a nine month old toddler named Albert and gave him soft and white toys to play with. Albert showed joy and affection when playing with the toys at first , but then Watson would make a loud noise behind Albert when playing with the toys. This would scare the toddler and soon when displayed with the toys he would show fear. Dr. Watson evaluated the pattern of joy then fear Albert showed despite the objects remaining the same to prove that fears are learned. No rule or prediction can be made in any science without an assessment of a previous pattern.
So then that takes us to the rawest form of science: math. Math is made up literally of patterns and algorithms, which are summarizations of patterns. Any field of science is based off of mathematical proofs of relationships. Although not all sciences have blatant mathematical equations like biology or physics, they include predictions and rules that were based off of evidence, and these rules most of the time include forms of math. This could be ways like assessing likelihood and percentage occurrence rates in experiments. This would be like making an experiment with a specific sample size and using that sample size to find how often something occurs. Therefore any science despite its field is the assessment of a pattern to predict an outcome.