SCIENCE MEETS REAL LIFE

Science Meets Real Life

Science Meets Real Life

Scenario 1:

In science as in all other areas of knowledge it is undoubtedly hard to reach specific certainties. In order to evaluate the conclusions, all ways of knowing are to be applied. The philosophy of science, or historiography, is to be addressed when evaluating these results. It is concerned with the concepts, methods and theories used in science: the study either of the scientific process and its development or of the methods used by historians to understand their material.

It has been said that both science and science are about finding the causes and effects of events: this is where the scientific method applies to reaching conclusions in science. On the contrary, it has been interpreted that science is about creativity an imagination: bias being an important problem facing an historian. Inevitably there has been the historians own individuality added to each piece of science he complies and as E.H.Carr observed: 'Study the historian before you begin to study the facts'. If a historian is to combine a scientifically rigorous method with intuitive creativity, how close to certainty will his conclusions get?

By addressing the reliability of scientific method in providing certainties and truths it will help clarify how far the historian can be confident with his conclusions when adopting the 'rigour' of a scientist. The scientific method is based on observation, reason and experiment: here a conclusion reached will be based incidentally on reason. For historians this will be impossible to achieve because one cannot re-create a situation from the past. Scientists are able to use sense-perception, their sight for example, when observing an outcome of any experiment: they can see that gravity works because the apple falls. A historian can only employ this method with the use of probabilities, where probability is used to define what the scientific evidence and sources are most likely to suggest.

Science was never my best subject. Let me just say a big thank you to Mrs. Alfiieri in 10th grade for allowing me to clean lab equipment for extra credit in chemistry so I could pass. I honestly tried; I studied very hard, but I just could not master the basics.

Science surrounds us every day. Physics,being basically the science of how things move, literally effects most of what we do every single day. For example, my boys were at a workshop where they built simple wooden trucks. I noticed their attempts to hammer the small nails into the wooden pieces were not suceeding for one reason - they were holding the pieces in their hands away from the table. In other words, every time the hammer hit the nail and the wooden piece, it caused each boy's arm to rock up and down. The energy from the hammer blow was being absoerbed and transfered to their arms, taking away from the energy distributed to the nail. I explained this simply, and we tried holding the pieces against the ...