by Science and technology are words that are used frequently in everyday life. However like so many other ambiguous words out there the meaning of these two words seem to ebb and flow depending on the context that they are being used in. When I think of technology my mind goes right to Steve Job’s Iphones and Elon Musk’s Teslas. While reading David Nye’s work, “Can we define technology,” it was brought up that technology is so much more than that. Nye states that technology was around even before language existed. At first this claim felt foreign and false. To me some of the first “technology” was things like the steam engine and the first electric sewing machine. Nye claims that technology is not only the things that have on and off buttons. Technology is anything that is human made for a certain function. Nye shows that there is a small difference between how a stick can be considered technology and a stick that is just a stick. When a human picks up a stick and makes it into a rake or a certain function this is technology. This is different from when an animal picks up a stick, uses it for something and then disregards it. The latter is not an example of technology because it lacks intent. Ben Franklin describes this difference of what separates humans from other animals. One of the first documented technologies was documented 1.6 million years ago which was a hand axe.
Science, like technology, can be widely interpreted. It also has been used and skewed for personal uses. Karl Popper realized this and wanted to find a way to differentiate pseudo-science from real science. Freud was an example of one of the pseudo-sciences that gained a great amount of momentum. Freud’s theories could not be proven wrong because they could be manipulated to fit almost any circumstance. One of the biggest tells that Popper used to differentiate pseudo-science from science is to see if there is a way to prove the conclusion wrong. One of Popper’s rules, that for me clarifies his message the most, is “Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiable; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.” He is saying that a theory can never be seen as a proven fact and must continue to be tested. A pseudo-science theory cannot be tested and therefore is not a science but a pseudo-science.
Both these words, science and technology, have a complicated history but most people do not stop to think about the real meaning or definition behind the words. These words are generally accepted and in these papers the authors dove deeper into the meanings. These words have evolved from their uses in the past and will continue to evolve in the future.