[moomin]

It's a funny one, because as has already been pointed out, science means more than one thing in English. There's "rigorous study" and there's "natural science". It's assumed that the latter is rigorous and our best philosophical model for this is Popper's falsifiability. And whereas pretty much everyone except string theorists now accepts this model, it's pretty recent. Many ancient Greeks, for instance, favoured thinking hard about a problem over experimental evidence, either before or after the fact.