A good rule of thumb is that fields which style themselves by adding "science" to their name are not sciences. An economist friend of mine told me that, and it stuck. In fact if you are a physicist you don't go around insisting to people that you are a scientist and what you do is science and if they disagree with you they are anti-science. You just say "hey, this is physics".

So far, this rule of thumb has not let me down.

FYI, you may want to read Feynman's lecture on Cargo Cult Science -- that is avoiding the trappings of science while not actually having the rigour and intellectual honesty of true science. A good link is here: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

I enjoy economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, etc, but they are most definately not science.

> good rule of thumb is that fields which style themselves by adding "science" to their name are not sciences

And this is your whole argument?

Isn't physics a "natural science" and therefore not science according your rule of thumb.

This discussion is stupid. If you want to argue that social sciences are not science, all you have to do is show that social sciences don't follow the scientific methodology. If you can't show that, you should shut up and stop wasting everybody's time.

Falsifiability applies to the big bang theory because the big bang theory is not about the general concept of "a" big bang, but about specific models of how exactly the events very shortly after the big bang happened, which make testable predictions about all the consequences of those very early events - the distribution of matter and energy in the universe, properties of cosmic microwave background, etc; such models can predict observations/measurements (of ancients events) that we have not yet made, and be falsified if those observations disagree with the model predictions.

Falsifiability is feasible to some degree -- e.g. in history you can hypothesize that a civilization had copper and then look for evidence of copper artifacts.

But in the physical sciences you have well-formed mathematical models that make very specific and precise predictions and can be tested to a high degree of accuracy. That specificity allows you to set threshholds like 5 sigma for acceptance of a result as being verified.

"Did we find copper" is a bit different, and thus there is a fuzziness in history that you don't have in physics or chemistry, which is why we don't view history as being a science even though it benefits from use of the scientific method. Everything -- cooking, dating, gardening -- can make use of the scientific method, but at issue here is the trust that the public places in accepted findings of science and such trust is not justified in the fuzzier fields. People need to add big error bars in their heads when listening to results from social sciences and much smaller error bars when listening to results from physics.