What is Science?
What is science? I do not mean just the dictionary definition, though perhaps we need to start with something commonly accepted like that in order to understand more fully what science is.
(This came up in the discussion of "Ego Depletion." My comments here were too long and involved for that. So, I offer this as a new topic.)
A few years ago, before going under the knife at a university research and teaching hospital, I signed an agreement that I understood that medicine is an art, not a science, and that outcomes are not predictable. Maybe that is why the German word for medical doctor is "der Arzt." But medical practice certainly depends on science, does it not? And they do have medical research, which we hope is practiced as a science, rather than an art like ballet or ceramics.
(Granted that art has a lot of science in it: chemistry of pigments, physics of firing, anatomy, botany... it is all there if you care to know. Does "the science of painting" make sense?)
In this discussion, blarman, WilliamShipley, and lucky differentiated engineering from science. We commonly accept the generalization that scientists discover basic laws; and engineers apply those to the creation of new products; and technicians maintain those creations. That is how things are today. History provides a different model.
The steam engine came before thermodynamics. The telegraph and telephone antedated Maxwell's Equations. Luther Burbank died 20 years before DNA was announced. Similarly, William Smith, who predicted and found the presence of coal by the fossil record of England, died 20 years before The Origin of Species (-- http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20....
Inventions are largely the improvements of technicians, not the direct applications of theories to new practices.
Computer science may not yet be a science, but the summary work we are doing now will be generalized into new theoretical models.
In William Gibson's "Bridge Trilogy" set in the immediate future, some of the viewpoint characters are artists in a beach house, majoring in Media Science at UC Berkeley. It is not a science yet...
But, what, then is a science?
I look at the practice. If a pursuit consciously chooses the scientific method, then it is a science.
We all know the basic Scientific Method:
1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.
http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics...
Norman Edmund (1916-2012), founder of Edmund Scientific - and who has not been a customer? - taught a 14-step process.
http://www.scientificmethod.com/index...
Steps or Stages of the Scientific Method
1. Curious Observation
2. Is There a Problem?
3. Goals & Planning
4. Search, Explore, & Gather the Evidence
5. Generate Creative & Logical Alternative Solutions
6. Evaluate the Evidence
7. Make the Educated Guess (Hypothesis)
8. Challenge the Hypothesis
9. Reach a Conclusion
10. Suspend Judgment
11.Take Action
Supporting Ingredients
12. Creative, Non-Logical, Logical & Technical Methods
13. Procedural Principals & Theories
14. Attributes & Thinking Skills
http://www.scientificmethod.com/index...
The way I learned it - five steps, seven, or more - publishing your findings is always the last step. That can mean just recording this in your notebook, if the results are intermediary. But in any case, you must finalize the process by making it possible for others to replicate the work.
That was perhaps the essential truth that separated chemistry from alchemy in Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist (1661). Boyle argued for open disclosure of means and methods. That openness - your own open mind open to the minds of others - may be the sine qua non of science. It also speaks to the tension of science in the context of national security. That is nothing new. Projective geometry was held as a French military secret. Can anything secret be a science?
(This came up in the discussion of "Ego Depletion." My comments here were too long and involved for that. So, I offer this as a new topic.)
A few years ago, before going under the knife at a university research and teaching hospital, I signed an agreement that I understood that medicine is an art, not a science, and that outcomes are not predictable. Maybe that is why the German word for medical doctor is "der Arzt." But medical practice certainly depends on science, does it not? And they do have medical research, which we hope is practiced as a science, rather than an art like ballet or ceramics.
(Granted that art has a lot of science in it: chemistry of pigments, physics of firing, anatomy, botany... it is all there if you care to know. Does "the science of painting" make sense?)
In this discussion, blarman, WilliamShipley, and lucky differentiated engineering from science. We commonly accept the generalization that scientists discover basic laws; and engineers apply those to the creation of new products; and technicians maintain those creations. That is how things are today. History provides a different model.
The steam engine came before thermodynamics. The telegraph and telephone antedated Maxwell's Equations. Luther Burbank died 20 years before DNA was announced. Similarly, William Smith, who predicted and found the presence of coal by the fossil record of England, died 20 years before The Origin of Species (-- http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20....
Inventions are largely the improvements of technicians, not the direct applications of theories to new practices.
Computer science may not yet be a science, but the summary work we are doing now will be generalized into new theoretical models.
In William Gibson's "Bridge Trilogy" set in the immediate future, some of the viewpoint characters are artists in a beach house, majoring in Media Science at UC Berkeley. It is not a science yet...
But, what, then is a science?
I look at the practice. If a pursuit consciously chooses the scientific method, then it is a science.
We all know the basic Scientific Method:
1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.
http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics...
Norman Edmund (1916-2012), founder of Edmund Scientific - and who has not been a customer? - taught a 14-step process.
http://www.scientificmethod.com/index...
Steps or Stages of the Scientific Method
1. Curious Observation
2. Is There a Problem?
3. Goals & Planning
4. Search, Explore, & Gather the Evidence
5. Generate Creative & Logical Alternative Solutions
6. Evaluate the Evidence
7. Make the Educated Guess (Hypothesis)
8. Challenge the Hypothesis
9. Reach a Conclusion
10. Suspend Judgment
11.Take Action
Supporting Ingredients
12. Creative, Non-Logical, Logical & Technical Methods
13. Procedural Principals & Theories
14. Attributes & Thinking Skills
http://www.scientificmethod.com/index...
The way I learned it - five steps, seven, or more - publishing your findings is always the last step. That can mean just recording this in your notebook, if the results are intermediary. But in any case, you must finalize the process by making it possible for others to replicate the work.
That was perhaps the essential truth that separated chemistry from alchemy in Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist (1661). Boyle argued for open disclosure of means and methods. That openness - your own open mind open to the minds of others - may be the sine qua non of science. It also speaks to the tension of science in the context of national security. That is nothing new. Projective geometry was held as a French military secret. Can anything secret be a science?
Previous comments... You are currently on page 5.
our nuclear deterrent work, so the answer to your last
question is yes. -- j
.
The above is an interesting aside to this thread.
It says- government money destroys science.
Consider: " three kinds of researchers, one driven by curiosity for the truth,
another on a mission to solve a problem, and
a third with an “induced” curiosity created by demand from elsewhere — boss or government.
He predicted that the system would fail if those who were induced outnumbered the truly curious, as the “induced” curiosity was not well connected to reality, whereas the other two types were. The primary aim of the induced researcher was not to solve a problem or uncover an answer but just to keep their jobs, and there were many ways to “keep their jobs” that did not involve actual discovery.
....
The government is strangling science. The more money it spends the more real scientists are forced out.
.. .. Instead of questioning the orthodoxy, the neo-”scientist” is there to maintain it. "
An example-
'Glaciers are under-studied from a feminist viewpoint ”that focuses on gender (understood here not as a male/female binary, but as a range of personal and social possibilities) and also on power, justice, inequality, and knowledge production in the context of ice, glacier change, and glaciology.”"
Part of the output from a $413,000 government grant which included -glaciers from a feminist perspective.
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/...
File under- feminist glaciology, ..
I generally agree with ProfChuck, but I will disagree on some of his corner cases in this instance: Newton's Laws of Motion are valid within the parameter of 'what is observable by human senses' but they do not apply cosmologically nor at atomic scale. Nonetheless, they are valid - within the stated constraints. A scientific principle does not have to apply everywhere in the universe (ie in a black hole) in order for it to be valid.
It is not necessary that science be useful or published or peer-reviewed; these are procedural aspects of science, not 'the discovery of reality' per se. (It is, however, necessary that a postulate be disprovable, per SBilko.) It is also not necessary for science to precede technology/engineering. It was the development of glass lenses that allowed both Astronomy and Microbiology to exist - the technology preceded the science.
Jan
http://www.monorealism.com/science/sc...
There's really more than one "publishing" step in the process. Before you conduct your major experiment (at least if it's in an area that involves observing natural phenomena, such as astronomy) you're supposed to share your intentions with your peers, so they can try it themselves, as Einstein did with the solar eclipse that validated Special Relativity. On the other hand, you're not supposed to present your conclusions to the lay public (who will take them as facts) until enough peer review has already happened that they're pretty reliable. If you publish early (effectively skipping the peer review process) you become known as a crank. There are a lot more cranks around than real scientists.
Of course, science can only apply to phenomena that are falsifiable (that is, testable), and this is where all attempts to "prove" moral theories fail. With enough observation, you may be able to say that following behavioral rule X produces measurable result Y, but any judgment of that result as good or bad is nothing but an expression of the speaker's preference for an outcome.
Astronomer William Keel explains:
The cosmological principle is usually stated formally as 'Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers.' This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.
The implications of this are significant and illustrate the roll objectivity and reason play in understanding the universe.
Interestingly there is a ethics to science.
Driven both by knowledge and instinct, various activities keep an individual and the species alive and may involve hunting, gathering, eating, shelter, reproduction, sleep.
Then there are social needs as (most) humans are social animals.
An important sub-class of both the above is trade. The word commerce is used to describe human activities which have some interaction at least at the selling end which have the objective of material gain.
Then there is the need for expression and creation by art, music and literature. This group may belong both to trade and social needs.
Then there is the human thirst for knowledge, for its own sake as well as for survival and commerce. There are various ways to attempt this. One such is called science or the scientific method. Science is the search for knowledge using approaches in MM's lists. This searching identifies and classifies knowledge rather than accumulating experience and data. Such classified knowledge leads rules, laws, to be drawn up using explanations from which predictions are made.
The objective for this activity we call science is the gaining of knowledge -is does not have to be useful.
The use, the application, of knowledge gain we call technology.
The application to trade and social needs occurs in such activities as engineering and medicine.
Rand- Nature, to be conquered must be understood.
Feynman- Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.
Apologies to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Yes. The same with Marconi. Physics said EM waves propagted line-of-sight. No one knew about ground wave or skip. He just kept cranking up the power, hoping that somehow the signals would get through and they did.
This seems to be an engineering feat, not a scientific one.
I think what you've posed is some methodology of how to do science.
Jaded engineers say non-engineers see it this way: Every success is a scientific achievement. When something goes wrong, however, it can be traced to an engineering failure.
I think that's old-school, and may be changing.
This sounds like a very poor choice of words on their part. So many things in science are modeled with a probability distribution function (PDF). The one I work with is signal strength in a multipath environment. Reflections from a pattern of nodes and antinodes as waves interfere constructively and destructively. You see that in physics class. Radio waves bounce off hundreds of objects, creating a jumble of nodes/antinodes, so we use models to estimate a PDF of signal strength.
So if I know the specs of a phone and base station I can calculate PDF of the signal being over some threshold, say some threshold where the packet error rate is low enough to make a clear phone call. If I had to figure out where a phone would work in a certain location where there's a significant probably of signal strength < the threshold of acceptable packet error rate, maybe I could say “I don't know. This is an art not a science,” but that would just be sloppiness to avoid explaining the science.