The Nature of Science: A - Z Guide to the Laws & Principles Governing the Universe
By James Trefil
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, 433 pages
ISBN 0-618-31938-7
My dear sons,
We all miss your grandpa dearly. Once in a while I still “talk“ to him during contemplative moments. Is he able to “hear” me from where he is right now? Has he traveled to another world - a different dimension or parallel universe, perhaps? I’d like to think he is in a place that is free of suffering and is “interceding” for us poor mortals here on earth.
The religious may call such a place “heaven“, but it is not totally alien to science. Theoretical physicists have postulated that there may be up to 26 spatial dimensions! An English astronomer (Martin Rees) coined the term “multiverse” to suggest many universes, co-existing independently but able to interact with one another. Do you find that a bit mind-boggling? Arthur Eddington, a British physicist, once said: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Take a God‘s-eye-view of the Universe. The sun, which we wake up to every morning, is 1,000,000 bigger than planet earth. But our sun is just one star among 200 billion stars in the galaxy we call the Milky Way. There are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone! That gives us 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. You can see how utterly and insignificantly microscopic we are relative to the size of the universe! I often think that God may well assume, for all intents and purposes, that we don’t exist!
The great physicist Isaac Newton likened his life’s work to that of a boy discovering pretty shells on the beach when “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered” before him. As you can imagine, there is still so much we don’t know about what‘s out there, despite the huge strides made by science so far. What then is science, you ask? Well, it began fundamentally with human curiosity. We have all asked questions like why is the sky blue or grass green? As Socrates rightly said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Science offers one way to inspect this life of ours. It is a quest for knowledge using a certain set of accepted and rational procedures.
The book I am reading now, The Nature of Science by James Trefil, has a good description of the scientific methodology. There are two approaches, basically - observation and experiment. The first is by simply looking at the objects around and noting their behaviour under different circumstances. The second is to conduct experiments in a controlled environment and recording the results.
From the data we then try to determine the rationale behind the observation. This is known as a scientific theory - an explanation that best fits the data. When a better explanation comes along the old one is discarded. You should remember that words like “theory“, “principle“, “effect” and “law” are often interchangeably and imprecisely used by the scientific community. There are no hard and fast rules that all scientists adhere to.
Collecting the data is the easy part. It was the interpretation of the information that made scientific superstars out of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Newton showed in detail that the fall of an apple and the precise motions of the planets could be explained by the universal force of gravitation. Einstein demonstrated that time and space curved around massive objects with his theory of relativity.
Trefil’s book is in essence a compilation of all the major rules and regulations governing nature discovered up to the start of the 21st century. The topics are sorted into 8 categories: astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences, life sciences, mathematics, miscellany, physics and rear window. There is enough information on each area for a young person contemplating a career in science to be able to gauge where his or her interests lie.
There are some 250 such topics covered by the book, ranging from the well-known to the obscure. Moore’s Law (Every index of computer performance improves by a factor of two every two years) is in there and so is Murphy’s Law (If something can go wrong, it will go wrong). Also included are ideas with intriguing names such as the Chandrasekhar Limit (A white dwarf star can be no more than 1.4 times as massive as the Sun), the Chronology Protection Conjecture (There is an as yet undiscovered law of nature that forbids time travel), Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (The position and velocity of a quantum particle cannot both be known with absolute accuracy at the same time), Maxwell’s Demon (Can the second law of thermodynamics be violated?) and the Beauty Criterion (Scientific theories are judged on aesthetics as well as on pragmatic criteria …).
Incidentally, “Miscellany” contains concepts that don’t belong in any particular group, such as Occam’s Razor (The simplest explanation is likely to be the right one) and the Turing Test (If computers can act in such a way that human beings cannot tell if they are interacting with a machine or with a person, the machine is said to have passed the Turing Test). “Rear view mirror” looks at ideas that have been discredited, such as Spontaneous Generation (Living things arise spontaneously from inorganic material) and Perpetual Motion (It is possible to make a machine that will run forever or, better still, provide a limitless source of energy).
James Trefil is an American educator and a passionate promoter of scientific literacy. He believes that every person ought to have enough knowledge to be able to form informed opinions about issues that affect the modern world, from cloning to global warming. He has authored more than 30 books and writes in a readable down-to-earth style that makes scientific concepts accessible to laypeople like you and me. Such motivation is admirable, in my opinion. You know I believe in the democratization of ideas. Scientific literacy equips the citizens of a nation to compete in the global environment. I am all for it.
My only quarrel with scientists in general is the tendency to get a little presumptuous when it comes to matters beyond the realm of science. Take the following sentence from the book: "Evolution thus differs from so-called creation science … because there is no observation or experiment that could conceivably convince a supporter of creation science that it is wrong."
That does not necessarily make creation science wrong, does it? You cannot declare that something is wrong just because you can’t prove it wrong! That won’t hold up in court and is an argument based on flawed logic. Science has no monopoly on knowledge, as far as I‘m concerned. Anyone who believes otherwise is worshiping a religion called Scientism.
Isaac Asimov called the human brain “the most magnificently organized lump of matter in the known universe”. If we can believe in an architect for the Taj Mahal, why can’t we do the same for the brain, which is so much more complex? To really understand the true nature of science we need to identify the limits of scientific methodology. Science can give us a lot of answers but not all of them.
Coming back to your grandpa, I suppose the quickest way to know his present whereabouts is to go there myself. Science may one day allow us to communicate with other worlds, but it’ll surely not be within my lifetime.
Meanwhile, let me leave you with a few puzzles from the book to tickle your grey cells. Have you ever wondered why the sky is dark at night when there are so many stars producing light? (This is called Olbers’ Paradox.) If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, why have we not received signals from it or detected evidence of it? (Fermi’s Paradox.) And if, in order to cross a room, we must first cross half, then half of what’s left, then half of that, then half of that …, doesn’t that make motion impossible? (Zeno’s Paradox).
Read the book, don’t wait for the movie!
Dad
By James Trefil
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, 433 pages
ISBN 0-618-31938-7
My dear sons,
We all miss your grandpa dearly. Once in a while I still “talk“ to him during contemplative moments. Is he able to “hear” me from where he is right now? Has he traveled to another world - a different dimension or parallel universe, perhaps? I’d like to think he is in a place that is free of suffering and is “interceding” for us poor mortals here on earth.
The religious may call such a place “heaven“, but it is not totally alien to science. Theoretical physicists have postulated that there may be up to 26 spatial dimensions! An English astronomer (Martin Rees) coined the term “multiverse” to suggest many universes, co-existing independently but able to interact with one another. Do you find that a bit mind-boggling? Arthur Eddington, a British physicist, once said: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Take a God‘s-eye-view of the Universe. The sun, which we wake up to every morning, is 1,000,000 bigger than planet earth. But our sun is just one star among 200 billion stars in the galaxy we call the Milky Way. There are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone! That gives us 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. You can see how utterly and insignificantly microscopic we are relative to the size of the universe! I often think that God may well assume, for all intents and purposes, that we don’t exist!
The great physicist Isaac Newton likened his life’s work to that of a boy discovering pretty shells on the beach when “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered” before him. As you can imagine, there is still so much we don’t know about what‘s out there, despite the huge strides made by science so far. What then is science, you ask? Well, it began fundamentally with human curiosity. We have all asked questions like why is the sky blue or grass green? As Socrates rightly said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Science offers one way to inspect this life of ours. It is a quest for knowledge using a certain set of accepted and rational procedures.
The book I am reading now, The Nature of Science by James Trefil, has a good description of the scientific methodology. There are two approaches, basically - observation and experiment. The first is by simply looking at the objects around and noting their behaviour under different circumstances. The second is to conduct experiments in a controlled environment and recording the results.
From the data we then try to determine the rationale behind the observation. This is known as a scientific theory - an explanation that best fits the data. When a better explanation comes along the old one is discarded. You should remember that words like “theory“, “principle“, “effect” and “law” are often interchangeably and imprecisely used by the scientific community. There are no hard and fast rules that all scientists adhere to.
Collecting the data is the easy part. It was the interpretation of the information that made scientific superstars out of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Newton showed in detail that the fall of an apple and the precise motions of the planets could be explained by the universal force of gravitation. Einstein demonstrated that time and space curved around massive objects with his theory of relativity.
Trefil’s book is in essence a compilation of all the major rules and regulations governing nature discovered up to the start of the 21st century. The topics are sorted into 8 categories: astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences, life sciences, mathematics, miscellany, physics and rear window. There is enough information on each area for a young person contemplating a career in science to be able to gauge where his or her interests lie.
There are some 250 such topics covered by the book, ranging from the well-known to the obscure. Moore’s Law (Every index of computer performance improves by a factor of two every two years) is in there and so is Murphy’s Law (If something can go wrong, it will go wrong). Also included are ideas with intriguing names such as the Chandrasekhar Limit (A white dwarf star can be no more than 1.4 times as massive as the Sun), the Chronology Protection Conjecture (There is an as yet undiscovered law of nature that forbids time travel), Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (The position and velocity of a quantum particle cannot both be known with absolute accuracy at the same time), Maxwell’s Demon (Can the second law of thermodynamics be violated?) and the Beauty Criterion (Scientific theories are judged on aesthetics as well as on pragmatic criteria …).
Incidentally, “Miscellany” contains concepts that don’t belong in any particular group, such as Occam’s Razor (The simplest explanation is likely to be the right one) and the Turing Test (If computers can act in such a way that human beings cannot tell if they are interacting with a machine or with a person, the machine is said to have passed the Turing Test). “Rear view mirror” looks at ideas that have been discredited, such as Spontaneous Generation (Living things arise spontaneously from inorganic material) and Perpetual Motion (It is possible to make a machine that will run forever or, better still, provide a limitless source of energy).
James Trefil is an American educator and a passionate promoter of scientific literacy. He believes that every person ought to have enough knowledge to be able to form informed opinions about issues that affect the modern world, from cloning to global warming. He has authored more than 30 books and writes in a readable down-to-earth style that makes scientific concepts accessible to laypeople like you and me. Such motivation is admirable, in my opinion. You know I believe in the democratization of ideas. Scientific literacy equips the citizens of a nation to compete in the global environment. I am all for it.
My only quarrel with scientists in general is the tendency to get a little presumptuous when it comes to matters beyond the realm of science. Take the following sentence from the book: "Evolution thus differs from so-called creation science … because there is no observation or experiment that could conceivably convince a supporter of creation science that it is wrong."
That does not necessarily make creation science wrong, does it? You cannot declare that something is wrong just because you can’t prove it wrong! That won’t hold up in court and is an argument based on flawed logic. Science has no monopoly on knowledge, as far as I‘m concerned. Anyone who believes otherwise is worshiping a religion called Scientism.
Isaac Asimov called the human brain “the most magnificently organized lump of matter in the known universe”. If we can believe in an architect for the Taj Mahal, why can’t we do the same for the brain, which is so much more complex? To really understand the true nature of science we need to identify the limits of scientific methodology. Science can give us a lot of answers but not all of them.
Coming back to your grandpa, I suppose the quickest way to know his present whereabouts is to go there myself. Science may one day allow us to communicate with other worlds, but it’ll surely not be within my lifetime.
Meanwhile, let me leave you with a few puzzles from the book to tickle your grey cells. Have you ever wondered why the sky is dark at night when there are so many stars producing light? (This is called Olbers’ Paradox.) If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, why have we not received signals from it or detected evidence of it? (Fermi’s Paradox.) And if, in order to cross a room, we must first cross half, then half of what’s left, then half of that, then half of that …, doesn’t that make motion impossible? (Zeno’s Paradox).
Read the book, don’t wait for the movie!
Dad
