As the author points out below, the success of science has less to do with a particular method than with an essential attitude of the scientist. This attitude is essentially one of inquiry, experimentation and humility before the facts. Therefore, a good scientist is an honest one. True scientists do not bow to any authority but they are ever ready to modify or even abandon their ideas if adequate evidence is found contradicting them. Scientists, they do place a high value on honesty. 来源：www.examda.com Science and the Scientific Attitude
by Paul G. Hewitt
Science is the body of knowledge about nature that represents the collective efforts, insights, findings, and wisdom of the human race. Science is not something new but had its beginnings before recorded history when humans first discovered reoccurring relationships around them. Through careful observations of these relationships, they began to know nature and, because of nature s dependability, found they could make predictions to enable some control over their surroundings.
Science made its greatest headway in the sixteenth century when people began asking answerable questions about nature -- when they began replacing superstition by a systematic search for order -- when experiment in addition to logic was used to test ideas. Where people once tried to influence natural events with magic and supernatural forces, they now had science to guide them. Advance was slow, however, because of the powerful opposition to scientific methods and ideas. 来源：www.examda.com In about 1510 Copernicus suggested that the sun was stationary and that the earth revolved about the sun. He refuted the idea that the earth was the center of the universe. After years of hesitation, he published his findings but died before his book was circulated. His book was considered heretical and dangerous and was banned by the Church for 200 years. A century after Copernicus, the mathematician Bruno was burned at the stake -- largely for supporting Copernicus, suggesting the sun to be a star, and suggesting that space was infinite. Galileo was imprisoned for popularizing the Copernican theory and for his other contributions to scientific thought. Yet a couple of centuries later, Copernican advocates seemed harmless.
This happens age after age. In the early 1800s geologists met with violent condemnation because they differed with the Genesis account of creation. Later in the same century, geology was safe, but theories of evolution were condemned and the teaching of them forbidden. This most likely continues. "At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past." Every age has one or more groups of intellectual rebels who are persecuted, condemned, or suppressed at the time. but to a later age, they seem harmless and often essential to the elevation of human conditions. 来源：www.examda.com