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Recommended: What is science
The Burgess Story
"I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're really not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors.
- Luis Alvarez, Physics Nobel Laureate -
Luis Alvarez evidently had some very definite ideas about what a good scientist does, and it is especially telling that such a comment comes from a physicist. What could Alvarez have had in mind when he made this remark? He may have been making a mental comparison of the approach commonly used in physics -- that of laboratory experimentation -- with the way the study of paleontology is conducted, A paleontologist is very much a historian -- someone who is involved in the "reconstruction of past events ... based on narrative evidence of their own unique phenomena" (Gould 278). In Alvarez's eyes then, good science is characterised by the experimental approach of experiment, quantification, repetition, prediction, and restriction of complexity to a few variables that can be controlled and manipulated" (Gould 277). This seems to me too narrow a definition. Such an approach can hardly be used in fields such as paleontology, which study the occurrence of one-off events such as evolution. In cases such as these, what standards can we use to determine whether something is admissible as good scientific practice? Philosophers of science such as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn have each come up with their own ideas of what constitutes good science. Can they perhaps shed some light on other possible definitions of good science? Can these other definitions of good science be generalised to all disciplines of science?
Popper and Kuhn have proposed strictly theoretical ideas -- It remains to be seen whether a concrete example of scientific resear...
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...se pressures? The critenia for good science is jmportant so that the scientist remembers not to cave in to these pressures, and the layperson remembers that scientists can be fallible.
Works Cited
Gould, Stephen Jay. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: W.W. Norton, c1989.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Kuhn, Thomas S. "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?" Criticism and the growth of knowledge: proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965. Vol 4. Eds. hnre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.
Feymnan, Richard P. "Cargo Cult Science"
7. John Wisdom, Paradox and Discovery (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1969), p. ix.
The white women in Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The older sister in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire both struggle mentally with reality and fantasy. Ella Downey, a desperately unstable, racially aware woman, struggles to overcome her insecurities, and is mentally torn between reality and fantasy. Like Ella, Blanche Dubois, a disillusioned woman, finds herself struggling mentally; unable to overcome reality, refuses to accept things are what they are, retreats to the fantasies of her mind.
Henry, John. (2001). The scientific revolution and the origins of modern science. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Publishing
Many people are inclined to say why would science even wish to peruse this method of research? Lewis Thomas says in his essay "The Hazards of Science" It would seem to me a more unnatural thing and more of an offense against nature for us to come on the same scene endowed... ... middle of paper ... ... J. Michael Bishop states that "The price of science seems large, but to reject science is to deny the future.
Many would remark that multitasking is a skill that can be trained like all others. However, a lot of neuroscience has went into proving that multitasking is a myth altogether. The article “The Myth of Multitasking” is written by Nancy K. Napier for Psychology today is here to debunk the myth of the brain’s capability to multitask. The article states that the brain is incapable of doing two things at once. Instead, the way that we fool ourselves into thinking that we can multitask is how quickly our brain switches from one task to another. Our brains can’t perform tasks simultaneously as our focus is a narrow beam. So, to compensate for this, our brain switches between these two tasks very quickly, almost as if we are doing them at the same
Are most American teenagers expecting to marry Asian women? We are familiar with definitions such as: Afro- American, Hispano American, but is Asian American the new substitute for the new white race?
Scientists are constantly forced to test their work and beliefs. Thus they need the ability to embrace the uncertainty that science is based on. This is a point John M. Barry uses throughout the passage to characterize scientific research, and by using rhetorical devices such as, comparison, specific diction, and contrast he is able show the way he views and characterizes scientific research.
Without theories, scientists’ experiments would yield no significance to the world. Theories are the core of the scientific community; therefore figuring out how to determine which theory prevails amongst the rest is an imperative matter. Kuhn was one of the many bold scientists to attempt to bring forth an explanation for why one theory is accepted over another, as well as the process of how this occurs, known as the Scientific Revolution. Kuhn chooses to refer to a theory as a ‘paradigm’, which encompasses a wide range of definitions such as “a way of doing science in a specific field”, “claims about the world”, “methods of fathering/analyzing data”, “habits of scientific thought and action”, and “a way of seeing the world and interacting with it” (Smith, pg.76). However in this case, we’ll narrow paradigm to have a similar definition to that of a ‘theory’, which is a system of ideas used to explain something; it can also be deemed a model for the scientific community to follow. Kuhn’s explanation of a Scientific Revolution brings to light one major problem—the problem of incommensurability.
Ferinad Puretz, Max. 'True Science', Review of Peter Medawar, Advice to a Young Scientist. N.p.: n.p., 1980. Print.
6. L. Pearce Williams and Henry John Steffens, The Scientific Revolution, vol. 2 of The
Cooper, Lawrence, Cary Murphy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Chicago: Taylor & Francis, 1996
Routledge, R. (1881). A popular history of science. (pp. 553-554).G. Routledge and Sons. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=VO1HAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Wolf, A. A History of Science, Technology and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Vol. 2. New York: Harper, 1959.
Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York, NY, US and London, UK: Harper & Brothers. Print. 8 Feb. 2014.
The use of credit and debit cards today are taking a tour in the sense that electronic cash is becoming more admissible as the world makes a switch towar...