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Asked by anon-274098 on 3 Dec 2020.
Question: How many branches of science are there ?
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Rebecca Rae answered on 3 Dec 2020:
Thats a tricky question because a lot of different bits of science overlap with each other. The main ones you will probably hear about at school are physics, chemistry and biology. But these all share some parts with each other and doing science often means using different branches of science at the same time.
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Jordan Warner answered on 3 Dec 2020:
This is a hard question to answer, because it depends on how much you want to divide science up.
Most of the time when we talk about “science” we mean natural science, which has three main branches – biology, chemistry and physics. That’s how they divide up science in school, so if you want a simple answer you can probably just say that there are three branches of science.
If you want a complicated answer, read on!
You can branch out from these into even more specific areas, from biology (life) to zoology (animals) to herpatology (reptiles and amphibians). You could consider these specialised fields as twigs on the branches of science – which isn’t a bad thing, trees need twigs as well!
There are also many things that don’t fall neatly into any one branch. For example, at university I studied biochemistry – as the name suggests, this involves both biology and chemistry (and some physics too), so our tree of science has lots of branches that split and then merge – it’s a pretty odd looking tree!
Other branches of “science” include social science (psychology, sociology and economics), formal sciences (mathematics, logic and computer science), and applied sciences (medicine and engineering), which are all important but may not be what you mean by science.
Taking all that into account, Wikipedia lists 714 different “sciences”, but that’s just a list of Wikipedia pages that could be classified as a branch of science (There’s a lot of red links, so some of those are no longer even on Wikipedia)! There’ll never be a definitive list, but I hope this has been interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_branches_of_science -
Kate Dobson answered on 3 Dec 2020:
As you go through school you tend to see science as Biology, Physics or Chemistry, but there is a lot of science and engineering topics out there that span these subjects and go far beyond the material you have time to cover in school. For example, physical geography separates into Geography and Geology, Biology into everything from studying ecosystem to medical research. The more you study science the “blurrier” the lines get. In real-world applications we are usually using science knowledge from different subjects and fields and areas all at the same time.
I use things I learned in materials science (which mixes physics, chemistry and engineering and a bit of maths) to solve questions we have with geoscience, and use methods we developed in bio-engineering to analyse samples from ancient buildings and from chocolate.
It’s all joined up, but if you end up working in science you usually have one or two small areas where you are more of a specialist.
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Amy Rattenbury answered on 3 Dec 2020:
I work in forensics which is just one type of science and even then there are lots of sub-disciplines of forensics. For example I work in archaeology (search and recovery of evidence) and anthropology (analysis of skeletal remains). But others also work in digital forensics (getting information from phones and computers), toxicology (drugs, poisons and alcohol testing) and serology (determining the origin of bodily fluids like blood or saliva)
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