Search results
People also ask
What does science mean?
What is science based on?
What are the characteristics of Science?
What does science study?
May 18, 2024 · Science, any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation. In general, a science involves a pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operations of fundamental laws.
- Scientific Method
The scientific method is critical to the development of...
- History of Science
History of science, the development of science over time....
- Biology
Biology, study of living things and their vital processes...
- Physical Science
physical science, the systematic study of the inorganic...
- Life
Life, living matter and, as such, matter whose attributes...
- Scientific Method
Science is a way of discovering what’s in the universe and how those things work today, how they worked in the past, and how they are likely to work in the future. Scientists are motivated by the thrill of seeing or figuring out something that no one has before. Science is useful.
Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.
Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence. Scientific methodology includes the following: Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool) Evidence.
- Discovery: The spark for science
- EVERYDAY SCIENCE QUESTIONS
- STELLAR SURPRISES
- A science checklist
- Science asks questions about the natural world
- Science aims to explain and understand
- A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM
- Science works with testable ideas
- Science relies on evidence
- A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM
- Scientific ideas lead to ongoing research
- A SCIENCE PROTOTYPE: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOM
- Participants in science behave scientifically
- Beyond physics, chemistry, and biology
- ✪ Natural world?
- ✪ Aims to explain?
- ✪ Testable ideas?
- ✪ Relies on evidence?
- ✪ Scientific community?
- ✪ Ongoing research?
- ✪ Scientific behavior?
- Science in disguise
- Disguised as science
- Science has limits: A few things that science does not do
- Science doesn’t make moral judgments
- Science doesn’t make aesthetic judgments
- Science doesn’t tell you how to use sci-entific knowledge
- Science doesn’t draw conclusions about supernatural explanations
- Science in sum
“Eureka!” or “aha!” moments may not happen frequently, but they are often experiences that drive science and scientists. For scientist, every day holds the possibility of discovery—of com-ing up with a brand new idea or of observing something that no one has ever seen before. Vast bodies of knowledge have yet to be built and many of the most basic ...
Scientific questions can seem complex (e.g., what chemical reactions allow cells to break the bonds in sugar molecules), but they don’t have to be. You’ve prob-ably posed many perfectly valid scientific questions yourself: how can airplanes fly, why do cakes rise in the oven, why do ap-ples turn brown once they’re cut? You can discover the answers ...
Henrietta Leavitt Astronomers had long known about the existence of variable stars—stars whose brightness changes over time, slowly shifting between brilliant and dim—when, in 1912, Henrietta Leavitt announced a remarkable (and totally unanticipated) discovery about them. For these stars, the length of time between their brightest and dimmest point...
So what, exactly, is science? Well, science turns out to be dificult to define precisely. (Philosophers have been arguing about it for decades!) The problem is that the term “science” applies to a remarkably broad set of human endeavors, from developing la-sers, to analyzing the factors that affect human decision-making. To get a grasp on what scie...
Science studies the natural world. This in-cludes the components of the physical universe around us like atoms, plants, eco-systems, people, societies and galaxies, as well as the natural forces at work on those things. In contrast, science cannot study su-pernatural forces and explanations. For ex-ample, the idea that a supernatural afterlife exis...
Science as a collective institution aims to produce more and more accurate natural ex-planations of how the natural world works, what its components are, and how the world got to be the way it is now. Classically, sci-ence’s main goal has been building knowl-edge and understanding, regardless of its potential applications—for example, investi-gatin...
Ernest Rutherford’s investigations were aimed at understanding a small, but illu-minating, corner of the natural world: the atom. He investigated this world using alpha particles, which are helium atoms stripped of their electrons. Rutherford had found that when a beam of these tiny, positively-charged alpha particles is fired through gold foil, th...
Only testable ideas are within the purview of science. For an idea to be testable, it must logically generate specific expectations— in other words, a set of observations that we could expect to make if the idea were true and a set of observations that would be inconsistent with the idea and lead you to believe that it is not true. For example, con...
Ultimately, scientific ideas must not only be testable, but must actually be tested—prefer-ably with many different lines of evidence by many different people. This characteristic is at the heart of all science. Scientists actively seek evidence to test their ideas—even if the test is dificult and means, for example, spending years working on a sin...
Ernest Rutherford’s lab tested the idea that an atom’s positive mass is spread out diffusely by firing an alpha particle beam through a piece of gold foil, but the evi-dence resulting from that experiment was a complete surprise: most of the alpha particles passed through the gold foil without changing direction much as expect-ed, but some of the a...
Science is an ongoing endeavor. It did not end with the most recent edition of your col-lege physics textbook and will not end even once we know the answers to big questions, such as how our 20,000 genes interact to build a human being or what dark matter is. So long as there are unexplored and unex-plained parts of the natural world, science will ...
Niels Bohr Niels Bohr built upon Ernest Rutherford’s work to develop the model of the atom most commonly portrayed in text-books: a nucleus orbited by electrons at different levels. Despite the new questions it raised (e.g., how do orbiting electrons avoid violating the rules of electricity and mag-netism when they don’t spiral into the nucleus?), ...
Science is sometimes misconstrued as an elite endeavor in which one has to be a member of “the club” in order to be taken seriously. That’s a bit misleading. In fact, sci-ence is now open to anyone (regardless of age, gender, religious commitment, physical ability, ethnicity, country of origin, political views, nearsightedness, favorite ice cream f...
We’ve seen that scientific research generally meets a set of key characteristics: it focuses on improving our understanding of the natu-ral world, works with testable ideas that can be verified with evidence, relies on the scien-tific community, inspires ongoing research, and is performed by people who behave scientifically. While not all scientifi...
The brains of rats and their workings are a part of the natural world, as is the behav-ior of rats.
Tolman aimed to explain how rats navigate their surroundings.
The two ideas about how rats navigate (mental maps vs. stimulus-response) are testable, but figuring out how to test them required some clever and logical thinking about experimental design. To test these ideas, Tolman and his colleagues trained rats in a maze which offered them many different tunnels to enter first. One of the tunnels twisted and ...
Tolman and his colleagues tested the mental map idea with several experiments, in-cluding the tunnel experiment described above. In that experiment, they found that most of the rats picked a tunnel that led in the direction of the food, instead of one close to the original reward tunnel. The evidence supported the idea that rats navigate using some...
Tolman published many papers on this topic in scientific journals in order to explain his experiments and the evidence relevant to them to other psychologists.
This research is a small part of a much larger body of ongoing psychological research about how organisms learn and make decisions based on their representations of the world.
Edward Tolman and his colleagues acted with scientific integrity and behaved in ways that push science forward. They accurately reported their results and allowed others to test their ideas.
Our Science Checklist fits well with a wide range of investiga-tions—from developing an Alzheimer’s drug, to dissecting the structure of atoms, to probing the neurology of human emo-tion. Even endeavors far from one’s typical picture of science, like figuring out how best to teach English as a second lan-guage or examining the impact of a governmen...
Teaching is an example of However, other human endeavors, which might at first seem a challenge that can be like science, are actually not very much like science at all. For addressed by science. example, the Intelligent Design movement promotes the idea that many aspects of life are too complex to have evolved without the intervention of an intell...
Science is powerful. It has generated the knowledge that allows us to call a friend halfway around the world with a cell phone, vaccinate a baby against polio, build a skyscraper, and drive a car. And science helps us answer important questions like which areas might be hit by a tsunami after an earthquake, how did the hole in the ozone layer form,...
When is euthanasia the right thing to do? What universal rights should humans have? Should other animals have rights? Ques-tions like these are important, but scientific research will not answer them. Science can help us learn about terminal illnesses and the history of human and animal rights— and that knowledge can inform our opinions and decisio...
Science can reveal the frequency of a G-flat and how our eyes relay informa-tion about color to our brains, but sci-ence cannot tell us whether a Beethoven symphony, a Kabuki performance, or a Jackson Pollock painting is beautiful or dreadful. Individuals make those decisions for themselves based on their own aes-thetic criteria.
In this section, we’ve seen that, though hard to define concisely, science has a handful of key features that set it apart from other areas of human knowledge. However, the net cast by science is wide. The Science Checklist matches up to a diverse set of human endeavors—from un-covering the fundamental particles of the universe, to studying the mat...
In this section, we’ve seen that, though hard to define concisely, science has a handful of key features that set it apart from other areas of human knowledge. However, the net cast by science is wide. The Science Checklist matches up to a diverse set of human endeavors—from un-covering the fundamental particles of the universe, to studying the mat...
In this section, we’ve seen that, though hard to define concisely, science has a handful of key features that set it apart from other areas of human knowledge. However, the net cast by science is wide. The Science Checklist matches up to a diverse set of human endeavors—from un-covering the fundamental particles of the universe, to studying the mat...
- 878KB
- 22
Science is a way of learning about what is in the natural world, how the natural world works, and how the natural world got to be the way it is. It is not simply a collection of facts; rather it is a path to understanding. Science focuses exclusively on the natural world and does not deal with supernatural explanations.
Jan 17, 2022 · Science is a systematic and logical approach to discovering how things in the universe work. It is also the body of knowledge accumulated through the discoveries about all the things in the...
