Matthew's Journal

On the other hand, maths has a fundamentally different character from most sciences, in that it's almost exclusively deductive where nearly anything else that gets labelled 'science' is inductive. So it's understandable that people should see it as not obviously the same thing; it all depends on what you think is the most important aspect.

I think one just has to accept that maths is a bit weird, and that if one is trying to categorise academic disciplines then one has to either make a category specially for maths, specify where maths should be filed, or resign oneself to it being filed all over the place :-)

I think that describes maths, not science.

Science is about refining and testing and disproving models of the world. Almost no science is about proving anything to be _right_ ; the best you can ever say is "we haven't yet found any counter-evidence to our model".

I think that much of the media think science is as you describe, and this is one of the big reasons why the media so often mis-represent science so badly. [ The whole "oh look, they've changed their minds about what foods are good and bad for you" style of reporting, for instance ].