Chapter 514

Recommended reading: ? In 1888, Darwin also gave a definition of science: "Science is to sort out facts, discover laws and draw conclusions from them." Darwin's definition pointed out the connotation of science, that is, facts and laws. Science needs to discover facts unknown to man, and use them as a basis to seek truth from facts, rather than pure thinking fantasy that is divorced from reality. As for the law, it refers to the inherent essential connection between objective things. Therefore, science is a knowledge system about the nature and laws of motion of various things in the objective world, which is based on practice, has been tested in practice and strictly logically demonstrated.

Science is a knowledge system about nature, society and thinking. It is produced and developed to meet the needs of people's production struggle and class struggle. It is the crystallization of people's practical experience.

First of all, science is different from common sense. Science seeks order among things through classification. Furthermore, science seeks to explain things by uncovering the laws that govern them.

Science is the phenomenon and laws of the universe. The laws established by the universe will not negate each other. For example, the universe will not stipulate that its regulations are wrong. The universe can only dictate that one is right and the other is wrong. Traveling through time and space itself is a refutation, and the science of time traveling is considered superstition.

The laws laid down by the universe will not be meaningless. For example, the universe will not stipulate that nothing exists in the universe, and an unchanging existence is meaningless, so objects in the universe will move, and the existence of life will appear.

A hypothesis can be tested simply by gathering information from other sources, it can be tested by additional observations, and more often it needs to be tested by designing an experiment. Experiments allow scientists to test a hypothesis by recreating an event. There are often multiple variables in an event, and the more variables there are, the more difficult it is to conduct an experiment. Therefore, a controllable experiment is needed, and the classic controllable experiment is divided into two groups, one group is called the control group; the other group is called the experimental group. Scientists tend not to accept the results of individual experiments because they may be random events with no causal relationship to the experimental variables. An experiment is only credible if a large number of repeated experiments show a clear cause-and-effect relationship.

One of the central features of the scientific method is communication. In most cases, the results of scientific research must be subject to supervision and review by others who are interested in the research. Communication occurs among people and steps of scientific inquiry, including publishing articles and making public ideas and trains of thought.

A scientist must first be a healthy skeptic. He must distinguish fact from assertion. Whether a thing is scientific depends on whether it is supported by a lot of rigorous evidence, not whether it sounds loud. In addition, scientists must have great attention to detail and a strong moral commitment to honesty.

The fundamental difference between science and non-science is whether the hypothesis can be tested. For example, we can assume that if he was killed in the Xi'an Incident, the War of Resistance Against Japan would be won more quickly. This assumption cannot be verified, so history is not science, but history, literature, sociology, economics, and philosophy all have their logical core ideas. At the same time, science and non-science are not static, such as economics, which also uses a lot of scientific methods to help explain economic phenomena, in general, it is still far from science.

Pseudoscience is not science, but uses the appearance of "science" and the language of "science" to persuade, confuse and mislead people into thinking that it is scientifically credible, they cannot stand the test of real science, and it belongs to the true subset of non-science . For example, nutrition is indeed a science, and many people advertise nutrition products under the guise of nutrition. We all know that the human body needs various nutrients such as amino acids, vitamins, minerals, etc. If the nutrients are lacking, the body will malfunction. Many scientific experiments have verified this point. In most cases, the efficacy of those health care products is far from what they advertised, and our body does not need these health products as advertised. In these ads, carefully selected out-of-context scientific information does lend credence to the products. In fact, most people's daily diet contains sufficient nutrients and does not need to take additional health supplements. It should be noted that these health products are often labeled as pure natural to promote that they are non-toxic, have no side effects and have significant effects. However, curaretoxin, nicotine, and nicotine are also pure natural substances. I don't think anyone is willing to add them to their diet.

We know from the definition of science that it is a method of finding information to solve problems, so science can only solve problems that have an objective reality basis. And problems such as morality, value judgments, social orientation, and personal attitudes cannot be solved by scientific methods, but it is absolutely impossible to ignore science in order to pursue the spiritual world. At the same time, science is limited by people's ability to discover the essence of natural phenomena. Humans make mistakes, and people sometimes come to wrong conclusions due to lack of information or misunderstandings.

Science itself has the ability of self-correction. When we acquire new knowledge, we must change or abandon the original wrong ideas. Therefore, it seems that the geocentric theory is a wrong conclusion. At that time, it was constructed through scientific methods, and it was only limited by human observation ability.

For any research method to be considered a scientific method, it must be objective. Another basic expectation is that there must be complete documentation to back it up, and that research methods must be carefully reviewed by a third party and confirmed to be reproducible.

Generally understood, science is the pursuit of the laws of nature. There is an important criterion for scientific laws, that is, there should be no counterexamples under certain circumstances. Any objectively existing and repeatable phenomenon, if it contradicts existing scientific laws, declares that the scientific laws have certain limitations.

The scientific method explains natural phenomena using reproducible methods. Develop thought experiments or hypotheses from predictions. Predictions are made before confirming experiments or observations to demonstrate that no intervention has been made. A disproof of a prediction is a proof of progress. Scientific researchers develop hypotheses to explain natural phenomena, and then design experiments to test these hypotheses. Such experiments need to simulate natural phenomena under controlled conditions. On the whole, the scientific method can solve extremely innovative problems without being influenced by subjective bias. To be continued.

Book friends who read Take the Supermarket to the End Times also like