Do all sciences use the same methods?

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by Mr. Hamtastic, Nov 21, 2008.

  1. Mr. Hamtastic whackawhackado! Registered Senior Member

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    For example, what are the methods a physicist would use to test a theory? How about a geologist? A psychiatrist? A sociologist?

    Are there universal methods, distinct to each field, or preferred methods from scientist to scientist, or one big method they all must follow?
     
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  3. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    The scientific method is a Muslim conspiracy that beats the illuminati hollow. It was developed by Alhazen [whose real name was Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, for which the western world was not linguistically prepared).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haitham

    As you can see, Muslim thought has successfully conquered the world
     
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  5. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    What ...so now that they've conquered it, they're intent on blowing it up?

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  7. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, I think there are, at least essential the same. (As proposed by Robert Bacon, if memory is serving me correctly) At least for the “experimental sciences.” By that I mean the "repeatable trials" sciences.

    Some sciences are only observational and model building efforts. - For example geology, but parts of the model are repeatable / testable sciences. As you move more into the "human sciences," especially psychology, it becomes more fashion than science, in many cases. So much so, that I do not consider them to be real sciences, although some parts even there are.
     
  8. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Sheesh Billy T,

    Everyone now knows that Alhazen did it first:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haitham

    Bacon probably read his work and did not credit him with it.

    http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Alhazen
     
  9. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Not everyone, but at least I NOW do. Thank you. I have skimmed your first wiki link. Even if only 20% true, he was fantastic!

    BTW there is no "probably" about it. Roger Bacon names him so sure Bacon is miss credited by many, at least of my generations, with the invention of the "Scientific Method." The older I get the more sure I am that the norm is for the credit to go to the wrong person(s).

    It might be informative and interesting to have a thread about this.
    I can never remember her name (you do) but Watson a Crick do not deserver the credit for the structure of DNA as much as she does.
    Henry Ford was at least 300 years after the assembly line was in routine use by the English makers of block and tackel for ships and even Adam Smith in Wealty of Nation describe and explained why each worker doing a separate task in a factory was much more economical and efficient.
    In such a thread, each contributor could make his argument for his favorate un-credited "true" deserver.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 21, 2008
  10. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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  11. Roman Banned Banned

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    Billy T-
    You're thinking of Rosalind Franklin
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

    In my bio courses at college, she's been recognized by both professors and text books as playing an instrumental role in the discovery of DNA's structure.
     
  12. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    You should hear some of the stories at CSHL/
     
  13. Jocariah Registered Senior Member

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    This so FUNNY ........
    So if a Persian thinks scientific thoughts ...... then they are not scientific but MUSLIM ????????? and Einstein thinks JEWISH thoughts right ???? Atheist scientists do not think scientific thoughts, but only ATHEIST thoughts ........ and christian scientists only think CHRISTIAN thoughts ................

    SAM , do you think muslims will ever get over their GIANT complex of minority ???????
     
  14. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Sure, don't you know? If a Muslim does anything, its because he's Muslim, not because he's Iraqi, Irani or Afghani. Ever hear of an Afghani insurgent? Nope, its an Islamic insurgent. Hence, its not a Persian method or a scientific method. Its an Islamic method

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  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The scientific method is universal:
    • It is based on the premise that the natural universe is a closed system (one that is not acted upon by external forces such as supernatural creatures);
    • It focuses on empirical observations of the present and past behavior of the natural universe;
    • It logically derives hypotheses from those observations;
    • Those hypotheses are tested and peer reviewed...
    • Until they are either falsified...
    • Or determined to be "true beyond a reasonable doubt" (to use the language of the law since the language of science sucks for communicating with laymen)...
    • In which case they become theories and are used to predict the future behavior of the natural universe.
    The differences lie in the way the empirical observations are performed. The language of science (which, as I believe I already mentioned, sucks for this purpose) refers to a whole family of types of observations as "experiments."

    We're all familiar with the classic laboratory experiments used in the "hardest" of the "hard sciences" like chemistry and physics. The experimenter builds a miniature environment as a microcosm of the natural universe, holds all of its attributes constant except the one he is testing, and then records the behavior of that environment under each tested value of the variable attribute. The variation in the behavior of the universe is then correlated with the variation in the value of the attribute, and a hypothesis is formed. Ice is less dense than liquid water. The acceleration of gravity is independent of the mass of the falling object. Lightning carries energy that can be conducted through ferrous metals. Bacteria die when exposed to bread mold. Electricity generates magnetism. Visual images can be duplicated by bombarding certain surfaces with focused cathode rays. E=mc^2.

    But in other sciences, the nature of the "experiments" is less controllable and fall more in the category of pure "observations." Biologists conduct field experiments to observe the behavior of wild animals and correlate its variances with changes in their environment, but they're very limited in the types of changes they can create by their own actions, without contaminating the site with their own presence. Often they're limited to following animals around and watching the way they behave in the naturally occurring conditions they encounter. Paleontologists are even more constrained and do nothing but observe; the best they can do is choose the location for a dig in which ancient environmental conditions appear to match the ones they are "testing" for. Their "experiments" consist of noting what kinds of organisms are represented in the fossil records from diverse eras and locations.

    Astronomy is generally regarded as the oldest science, and was practiced so long ago that it may predate civlization. Yet, has anyone read about an astronomer moving a few heavenly bodies around to see how they behave? The "experiments" of astronomers involve correlating huge reams of data from their observations, and looking for mathematical relationships that hint at the answers to their questions. Astronomy has been enormously boosted by modern technology--spectrography and high-resolution telescopes provide terabytes of data that massively parallel computers can reduce into discrete hypothetical phenomena--but notwithstanding all that, the "experimentation" done by astronomers consists merely of choosing the right place to look. If it weren't for the lightspeed lag, they wouldn't even be able to look at the universe's past behavior at all!

    When you get into the "soft sciences," the problems with "experimentation" get even worse. Psychologists, sociologists, economists and anthropologists come up with some pretty interesting hypotheses. But except under amoral totalitarian regimes like the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, ethical concerns (not to mention sheer problems of scaling) prevent them from constructing laboratories and measuring changes in human behavior as they adjust the value of their variables. Practitioners of the soft sciences experiment by observing, occasionally meddling--with the consent of the experimental subjects in a very loose interpretation of the scientific method.

    My speciality, linguistics, is one of the "softest" of the soft sciences. The evidence we have to support our theories about language families, phonetic drift, borrowing and assimilation, syntax evolution, etc., is largely limited to the records that have only existed for a few thousand years since the invention of the technology of writing, and a century since the invention of the technology of sound recording. Everything else is clever speculation. We talk about a "curtain" that we run into when we try to look back more than about ten thousand years. We will probably never be able to answer our most important questions:
    • When was language first developed?
    • Did it arise more than once or are all languages descended from one common ancestor?
     
  16. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    How does the scientific method assume a closed system?
     
  17. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks. Much more than a "role" IMHO. She did the nearly impossible task of crystalizing the DNA molecules to permit X-ray difraction pattern to be photographed. Then she did that. Then she showed her results, gave copies of the evidence, to Watson and Crick.

    That pattern was easily recognizable by ANYONE versed in Laue Diagrams* as due to a spiral structure. As far as I can tell W.& C. only contrubution was to suggest it was a double spiral with the genetic coding in the "molecular bridges" between the two spirals. They got the N. prize with less than a couple of weeks of effort using the data supplied by R. Franklin. She did all the hard work over several prior years.
    ------------------
    *Name physicists use for the quasi graphical process of interpretation what the collection of spots of the diffraction pattern photo implies was the structure that scattered the X-rays. For example, all cubic crystal give one pattern and the unit crystal size is determined from it and the experimental set up used. The relative intensity of the spots tells something about about the relative number of electrons at each point of the unit cube, for example a NaCl cubic crystal. Pattern for other structures is also well known. It is not trivial to make the X-ray diffracion pattern as one must make it with monochromatic X-rays (one wavelength).

    Roslind died of cancer. Quite probably, she gave her life for this effort (and others she made with X-rays). IMHO, she deserves most, if not all, of the credit for the discovery of the DNA structure. W. & C. do deserve honor for understanding of how the genetic information is stored within the structure Rosalind discovered.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 22, 2008
  18. synthesizer-patel Sweep the leg Johnny! Valued Senior Member

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    And who says you are unable to self-parody SAM

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  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Duh? All of our meticulous observations of the workings of the natural universe, and all of the theories we spend centuries deriving from them, are worthless if some fucking invisible god is out there making things happen that falsify "the laws of nature" just for his own perverse amusement.

    If the natural universe that we can observe and measure is not a closed system, then science is pointless. And this is in essence what the religious fundies are telling us: Don't bother trying to figure anything out, our smirking god will reveal to us what he thinks we're worthy of knowing... when and if he feels like it. Oh, and he might deliberately mislead us by leaving seemingly contradictory evidence lying around, as a test of our "faith."
     
  20. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    So the scientific method is dependent on the concept of a closed system? I ask because I have never come across this concept before. What happens in systems where the laws of physics don't apply or appear to break down [like singularities}? Is that considered to be part of the closed system, regardless?
     
  21. Roman Banned Banned

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    No, it's just that you can't use science to look through/past them. For instance, if the universe was created in a big bang from a singularity, then it is impossible to know what came before that.

    Science doesn't really operate on the universe being a closed system. If there were invisible forces out there, presumably they'd be predictable, as well, and operate by some yet unknown set of laws. The assumption science makes is that there are laws by which all things operate.
     
  22. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Thats what I figured too.
     
  23. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, but perhaps instead of "closed" "isolated" is better way to state this basic idea: that if anything from the outside of your "system" can modify your "system" then you can not possibly predict what will happen - repeat the experiment etc.

    Science has two fundamental assumptions:

    (1) There are systems which can be very well isolated from all non-system influences. For this reason scientist do not subscribe to astrology where the location of Pluto would significantly effect the results.

    (2a) That on the macroscopic level the behavior of the system is regular, or "law governed"

    (2b) That on the "quantum" level the average behavior of the system is regular and the probability of individual trials / experiments is fixed and, in principle, computable / predictable.
     

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