Dan Zarrella tweeted, asking his followers to define "science".

Science is a methodology that lets us progress in a world of blackboxes. Every object (living, non-living, or dead) is like a blackbox. We can observe, measure, and analyse their behavior and components.

Each blackbox is composed of other objects. They are blackboxes too, recursive in nature, drilling down into the smallest of "known" particles and perhaps beyond.

As such, each blackbox is therefore also a component of one or more interacting and encapsulating blackboxes, the largest known to us being the universe itself and perhaps beyond.

It is to the advantage of all sentient blackboxes to control other blackboxes for matters of both necessity and desire. Humans have turned that process into an organized system called "Science". Animals and lesser forms of living blackboxes act on observations and stimili in a self serving way without any overlaying philosophy (that is known to us).

We study the behavior of blackboxes. We see how they respond to stimuli as we observe, measure, analyse, and develop hypotheses - some of which begin to show high accuracy in the predictions they suggest regarding what is observed in controlled experiments.

We then recursively look at the components of a blackbox and try to understand and gain control of those as well. Our control may be imperfect, but it still allows us to predict outcomes to within acceptable or standardized levels of deviation.

There is great variance in how much we understand and/or control blackboxes. Imagine a remote control toy nearing the limits of its signal range, and not responding appropriately to the controllers commands or imagine the constants of Science like the Speed of Light, C.

We treat every object in the world, including other people, like blackboxes... and once we understand what triggers their behavior in predictive capacities, we can control and leverage these blackboxes. We can extract value from them and determine ways to combine them into new variations whose resulting output is highly likely to match our expectations and produce more value for we, the Sentient.

tl;dr Science is power in a world of blackboxes.