One way to look at science

 If you even suspect that you might be interested in the philosophy of science, you might give Alfred North Whitehead a try.

Here, in a nutshell, is one way of looking at science:

The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today are the great tragedians of Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of Fate, remorseless and indifferent, is the vision possessed by science. …

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. … The laws of physics are the decrees of Fate.

Whitehead saw almost everything as a process. In his view, a human being is not a thing. Or more accurately, it’s not helpful to think of a human being as a thing. A human being is more accurately described as an event, or a process involving many events.

Science is a sustained process of trying to get at how things work. Whitehead thought it should look at events and processes involving events, rather than at things.

 • Source: Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World; New York: Free Press, 1997.