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We humans observe the natural world and science is about seeing things happen and recording and investigating it. In order to discern how it works, we need to observe it multiple times and compare data to try and understand it.

Yet, are there processes in the universe that scientists are pretty sure have only happened once? I’m not taking about the universe itself because we aren’t sure it only happened once).

Repeatability and reproducibility are cornerstones of science. Yet conditions for repeating an experiment or making an observation a second time are never truly identical, because the world is in constant flux and we can never create or encounter identical conditions. It is as Heraclitus said, one cannot step in the same river twice.

If something only happened once, can it be called science?

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    Perhaps more relevantly, how can anything happen more than once? Different time, different place, different objects, how is one instance of an event type the same as another instance of an event type?
    – David Gudeman
    Commented yesterday
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    The question is very unclear. It's unclear what measure here would here to say whether 2 observations can be about the same thing or not. Also it's unclear why it would matter whether something happens exactly once, or exactly twice, or thrice. It would seem the relevant question would be how frequently and easily anything can be observed, independently of how often it happens. Since science cannot observe the whole universe, science can never positively assert something did NOT happen again somewhere else.
    – tkruse
    Commented yesterday
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    I am vote-to-reopen on this. It's a fine question - raised by philosophers from Heraclitus to Nancy Cartwright.
    – Adam Weisberg
    Commented yesterday
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    Science is an effort to understand and explain. It is much harder to study and explain things that happen only once, but that does not necessarily mean impossible. There may be enough data, or there may not. If there isn't, the scientific process can create theories to be tested if more data becomes available but withholds judgment
    – keshlam
    Commented yesterday
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    Question is pretty clear and seems to have been closed by the usual people who haven’t read philosophy. Voting to re open
    – Syed
    Commented yesterday

5 Answers 5

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Every event only happens once. The purpose of the sciences is to categorize types of events that fall into the same basic models. In other words, If I drop an apple that is a singular event: it happens in one place at one time with one apple. But if I make a model of how any given apple will fall if dropped, then I'm doing science.

Basically a scientific model says that we can treat a wide assortment of unique, individual events as though they are the same by removing all of the unimportant, idiosyncratic features that make them unique. For instance, a model of a falling apple will ignore the variety, color, taste, and specific size and shape of the apple, as well as the particular time or location of the event, since none of these attributes (in simplified conditions) are essential to model the event of falling. All of the potentially infinite unique events of dropping apples are hedged or equivocated as the same type of event, in the understanding that this type of event can be replicated in a systematically reliable way (with minute variabilities that we can gloss over).

Replication is not the same as repetition. Replication is making a copy, caring only that the copy captures the thing being copied in broad strokes.

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The Big Bang is a single event in our universe. Science is investigating that.

We can hypothesise other universes. I am not sure it is helpful to do this unless we can somehow detect them - in which case they overlap with our universe and are not really separate. But people do hypothesise other universes, and it may get them somewhere useful some day.

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  1. We observe single phenomena. But science always designs a general theory. Science is not about the single event, it is about finding a general law behind all similar events.

  2. Of course there are important theories, where until today we only know a single event which falls into the range of the theory. E.g., the theory of biological evolution. And also the theories about the origin of life.

    But therefore these theories are not non-science, not at all.

  3. Nevertheless a scientific law must always cover a type of events, not a single specific one.

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    Quibble: while we sometimes refer to principles as laws, properly speaking science only produces theories, always reserving the right to refine, correct, or replace them if necessary in the future. Which is sometimes unsatisfying for people who really do want laws and have tried to use this to rhetorically attack science.
    – keshlam
    Commented yesterday
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Whether some event only happens once depends on the level of abstraction in the description

Depending on the level of description, all events may only happen once.

For example, the event that "X Planck units of time after the Big Bang, neutron N decayed" only happens once.

And "the New York Yankees lost the 2024 World Series" only happens once.

Events simpliciter are neither science nor non-science

Events are not categorized as science or non-science. People do not generally speak of an event being science.

We instead categorize the approach to inquiry as science or non-science. Or a theory as scientific of non-scientific.

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Correct. For example History which deals with non-repeatable events is often wrongly called science.

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