what is basic science
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What is basic science?
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6 Answers
Sharad Sinha
Sharad Sinha, Assistant Professor,Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Goa
Answered Jan 22 2016 · Author has 230 answers and 368.3k answer views
Basic science principally refers to the scientific disciplines of Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics as well as to their sub-disciplines. It gets a bit tricky with respect to sub-disciplines, for instance Computational Chemistry or Computational Material Science, as they often interact with engineering disciplines like computer engineering, scientific computation etc.. The principal idea behind something being labelled as basic science is that study of basic science leads to a better understanding of natural phenomena. It looks for "knowledge and discovery of facts" to enable one to understand an already existing phenomenon. For instance, Botany teaches you how plants grow, how plants synthesize food, why their leaves are green etc. Physics teaches you why things fall, what produces light etc. Mathematics teaches you what numbers are and how they are evaluated, what equations are and how they are solved. Most of basic science related study does not look for an application that would benefit from it. It looks for knowledge. Application of that knowledge is a by-product which is generally not considered primarily in basic science related research/studies.
You can argue that as far knowledge is concerned, when computer science or any engineering discipline is studied or taught, we are gaining knowledge. True, except that this knowledge does not describe natural phenomena, something that you would observe in nature, something not created by man. Engineering on the other hand, is about applying knowledge thus gained to solve a problem. Of course, within engineering also, there are areas that are more theoretical (for example algorithms in computer science) and those that are more practical (for example design of integrated circuits). But they all provide insights into something that man created: cars, airplanes, computers etc. It is also not always necessary for the progress of modern engineering to be dependent on basic scientific discoveries. The "theoretical" aspects of many engineering disciplines are very strong.