Science, to me, is both an enterprise and the method used to advance that enterprise. The method of science is the method of testing and experimenting with the world around us, observing the results, and building models that offer explanations of the results we observe. Then, using predictions made from those models, we set up further tests to either refine or reject them.
In the end, of course, we are not approaching some sort of absolute Truth (because I'm not fully sure that absolute Truth has a scientific meaning) with scientific inquiry, but we are building more and more accurate models.
But science is more than just this method. Science is the pursuit of understanding. The pursuit of figuring out what makes the universe tick. For a religious scientist (like myself), it is the process of working out what laws and processes and methods God used and uses to work with things.
This enterprise is a collaborative effort, premised on interpersonal trust - I trust that the scientists who are working in a field where I have no expertise are doing valid experiments and achieving meaningful results, that the process of reporting those results is not meaningfully impacted by personal pride or vanity or desire for monetary gain.
Each instance of research fraud is a blow against that foundation, but to accept and work in the enterprise of science is to believe that the self-correcting mechanism of constantly repeating experiments, looking to verify or disprove results, is stronger than the efforts to derail or misdirect the mechanism.
On the subject of faith and science, I go further than just believing that they are compatible. The fundamental premise of science is a faith-driven one. Not a religious one, to be certain (although there is potential religious meaning there), but the fundamental premise of science is the belief that the human mind is, in fact, capable of understanding the universe - that the models built by our human brains and subject to the limitations of human beings are in fact, capable of transcending those limitations.
I believe that this is true, but that belief is and must be an expression of faith.
For me, worldbuilding is an art, and takes a long time. The worlds I work on - Edassa, the worlds of the Starnet, Hatharin (the world with the continent-sized desert I talked about above) - are all the product of immense amounts of time spent thinking and molding and rethinking and abandoning and coming back to and splicing and pruning and amputating the setting. (Well, by the time I'm ready to do anything in Hatharin, it will be - but it's only a few months old now)
Edassa has been percolating in my mind for 11 years. It's undergone major structural changes - my 14-year old self would hardly recognize it now. The Starnet is only a little younger than that, maybe 9 years or so. And that same 14-year old self would be heartbroken at some of the cool ideas that got abandoned along the way for both worlds.
I hope he'd be amazed at some of the new ones that found their way in, though.
For me, the actual mechanics of worldbuilding start with a setting becoming real to me (like Edassa and the Starnet are - Hatharin is too young for that yet). That requires characters, for me at least. If there aren't characters in it with stories to tell, then the setting isn't real yet.
Edassa started that way. In a very real sense, it grew up as the setting for Zephyr Westwind (don't judge my 14-year old self's naming ability ), Kal Seonid and his grandfather Samhain, and later Areska Lasofer, Asher-veradon Kitsara, Ariel Kilbaen, Kedonai and Niobe Verekai, and a host of others. (Including, at this point, the Paladin Bran the Blessed, Fenrison, the Inquisitor Samuel Carthen, Murk, Shuster Toktureed, Khuvlai, Fina, and the rest).
The details grew in fits and starts. I drew a map, because it needed it, and then a brief history came together. Oddly enough, a whole lot of the detail came from modding or building scenarios in various computer games. I made the map so I could put it in Civ II, and the current set of culture groups came because I was thinking about a total-conversion mod for Age of Empires II (currently not yet started, because I'm still behind on my Wheel of Time mod).
That got me thinking a lot about what the various militaries are like, how they are organized, what weapons are preferred and how that changes over time. Finding names for various units got me a language distribution (even if I did rip off most names from real-world languages that might have no business being in a fantasy world. Language has always been my weakness).
Other things came from my college studies. Taking classes for my Religious Studies major got me thinking about what religions were like on Edassa, and how they had grown and evolved and changed. This in turn made it rather critical for me to start thinking about what things were actually like in the cosmos there, so that I would know how to present the religions properly. Were all religions just naively optimistic (or pessimistic, as the case may be) ways of looking at the world that ultimately had no truth to offer? (That was an unsatisfying answer, not least because I rather strongly believe that that is not the case in the real world.) Eventually I settled on a cosmology that drew exceptionally strongly from my Mormon beliefs, adapted slightly and reframed significantly before being fleshed out with elements drawn from the heavily speculative Mormon theologies of the late 1800's as well as my take on how the most recent archeological developments in understanding ancient Hebrew religion would have been projected into those theologies. The magic system came quickly out of that setup.
My physics studies also required me to rationalize the basis of my magic system, ensuring conservation of energy (most of the time) and allowing me to draw on force laws that already exist in nature to describe relationships of magic. (One of my favorite phrases that came out of this, now part of a discarded magic concept, was "Let us consider magic as a field force, arising from the interactions of a scalar potential...")
This description is now a lot longer than I expected when I started answering this question, so sorry, I guess? Ask more questions if you're still curious.
Hmmm....a cultural tidbit from Edassa?
Let's see. I've been working on Starnet most recently, so Edassa has kind of receded into the background temporarily. But I'll see what I can pull out of the memory files there.
I don't think I've talked a lot about the Taravoy peoples yet, so there is an interesting culture.
They have inhabited an archipelago near the equator for several millennia, and have colonized several other archipelagos and islands as well. They are the lords of the seas, and there is a strong cultural seafaring tradition. Their ships are technologically advanced, and they are the original developers of gunpowder.
But we aren't talking about military matters here, so let's look at their culture. Their home archipelago is volcanic (it is actually the partially submerged caldera of an oceanic supervolcano larger in diameter - but not height - than Olympus Mons) in nature, and ring shaped. Hotspots in the center have formed a few low-lying volcanic islands that are much more geologically recent (though they almost all likely predate human habitation of the archipelago - the most recent is potentially within the range of dates when the ancestors of the Taravoy could have arrived). One of these has a lava pool like Kilauea on it, which is revered as the dwelling-place of a fire goddess.
This is geographical, not cultural, though, and I need to wrap up (time constraints...frustrating things). So a cultural tidbit about the Taravoy is the class of the bahri, the sea dwellers. Basically, any child who is born on the ocean is considered touched by the ocean goddess (the Taravoy pantheon is entirely female - make what you will of that), and is taken and set apart to her. They are henceforth forbidden to set foot upon land for more than an hour, and require extensive purification rituals before and after. Whole ships crewed by these bahri sailors (both men and women - once touched by the ocean, children are considered to be cut off from the traditional way of doing things, including traditional gender roles) roam the seas, only seldom putting in to port for supplies. Many bahri consider it a point of pride that they have never set foot upon land, having slaves to do so for them.
Some bahri become pirates, and the reputation of these few have colored the perception in the eyes of the whole continent (well, at least the parts that are aware of them), so that bahri are looked at with a mixture of awe, fear, and suspicion in every port they land in. They are, however, highly desired mercenaries and trading ships.
Hope you enjoyed it!
