I was at the beach this afternoon and found myself talking with my uncle Mort about of all things yoga! He is a Physics teacher and a cynic at heart. He questioned me about how one is tested in yoga. "How does one win" or "how can one be measured" were the sorts of things he was asking about. I explained that yoga is not about advancing but about calming the mind.

I went through the eight limbs of yoga as described by Patanjali stopped me on Pratyahara, and asked well how does one do this? I answered that one has to embark on the path of yoga and practice yama and niyama, pranayama and asana before one is able to even think of pratyahara. I told him that yoga, like physics, is a science that needs to be approached in a methodical way. He did not like the sound of this and went on a 5 minute rant about science being proven and tested and this sort of talk. Then I told him that many quanta physicists where now coming to the same conclusions as many of the mystics thousands of years ago. He continued to disagree with me, and scold me that meta-physics can never be proven and therefor is not science.
We were definitely coming from different directions, but in the end I told him that yoga was a practice endeavor and that it did not matter if we called it science or smience. It still works.