THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

SCIENCE ASKS THREE BASIC QUESTION:

1. What’s there?

2. How does it work?

3. How did it come to be this way?

PRINCIPLE OF SCIENCE

• Seeks to explain the natural world.

• Assumes that this is possible by gathering evidence about it.

SCIENCE IS A PROCESS• Ideas are developed through

reasoning and experiments.

• Scientific claims are based on testing explanations against observations of the natural world and rejecting the ones that fail the test.

• Subject to peer review and replication.

• Scientific conclusions are well supported by facts and are tentative only in the sense that all ideas are open to scrutiny

• Science is not democratic: ideas are accepted/rejected

• based on evidence not what people think

• Science is non-dogmatic. In science things are not accepted on faith but on evidence.

• Science cannot make moral or aesthetic decisions.

SCIENCE CORRECTS ITSELF.

• Theories are central to scientific thinking:

Theory

- Popular meaning: a guess

- In science: a well-substantiated explanation of events observed in the natural world

Fact

• A natural phenomenon repeatedly confirmed by observation.

Law

• A description of how a natural phenomenon will occur under certain circumstances.