By Rohit Shukla.
Arguably Physics is the most exact Science our civilization knows. It is only in the last 100 years or so that more and more disciplines like medicine, psychology joined in and started claiming to be a scientific discipline. Economics, political and social sciences joined this queue rather recently.
Precise and accurate measurement of temperature, the velocity of light is golden examples of what EXACTNESS means in Science. However, measuring the state of democracy or happiness are all very qualitative concepts as no Universal definition exists.
Any discipline tends to qualify more and more as a scientific one, as the terms and keywords it deals with can be measured. So long as it exclusively deals with qualitative concepts, such as beauty, sincerity, and loyalty, it remains more or less an Art discipline. A good example of such artistic and subjective phenomena will be the beauty contest.
Next to physics and chemistry, it is the discipline of medicine that was accepted as a science although not as exact as physics.
Medicine, psychology, economics, and political disciplines were gradually discussed as Science as more and more procedures and instruments were standardized to measure vitals like blood pressure, heart rate, IQ, EQ, GDP, BPL, and national income.
Nowadays, while medicine, psychology, economics are well accepted as science, it is important to realize that they are not as exact Science as Physics and Chemistry ( even medicine is not). Political science, social science is called loosely science but are all inexact or fuzzy scientific discipline at best
When we measure the temperature of water in a beaker using a thermometer many times. Each time the value of temperature will be reproduced with high precision. However if the sometimes cold and sometimes hot wind starts blowing close to the water contained in the beaker, the measured temperature will start fluctuating. As the parameters which influence the measured quantity in this case temperature are poorly controlled. The reproducibility of the measurement gets poor. Of course, you may argue that if we place the beaker in an air-conditioned laboratory such fluctuations will not occur and a highly reproducible value of the temperature will exist.
In complex real situations like economics, political and social sciences the parameter which influences the outcome cannot be controlled as we can do it for a lab using an air conditioner due to uncontrolled and uncontrollable parameters on which complex quantities like blood pressure GDP depend, they can only be known in a range with poor reproducibility.
Inexactness is the hallmark of complex systems, L. Zadeh called it the principle of incompatibility: “The closer one looks at a real-world problem, the fuzzier becomes the solution,” and thus, im- precision and complexity are correlated. Fuzzy sets are mathematics that deal with disciplines that have an inherently high degree of uncertainty and imprecision.