Science, in its purest sense, is the pursuit of knowledge. It reflects the body of knowledge about the physical world. In order to be considered a science one must have observable information to gather. This is the first step in the scientific method. Once collected, the data is then classified.
Classification reflects the observed relationships between the data collected.
The second step in the scientific method provides an explanation of the observed relationships. The central purpose of science is to explain. Explanations must be testable and predictable . More than one explanation may be possible with the available data. The initial explanation that a scientist proposes is called a hypothesis .