Aug 1, 2007
A
scientist's job is to figure out how the world works, to get "Nature"
to reveal her secrets;
and just who are these people in the lab coats and how do they do it?
It turns out that there is a
good deal of mystery surrounding the solvers of the unknown.
What it is about the human species that makes them capable of doing science?
The procedures by which human scientists come to scientific conclusions and how they practice the scientific method with its hypotheses, data collection and statistical analysis remains somewhat of a mystery.
Two vital ingredients seem to be
necessary to make a scientist:
1)
curiosity to seek out mysteries and
2)
creativity to solve them.
Scientists
often delve deeper into a basic question showing a passion for knowledge for its
own sake. According to one definition, curiosity
is a sensitivity to small discrepancies in an otherwise ordered world. Studies
have shown that
curious people have a mixture of seemingly conflicting
desires: they seek novelty and strangeness and yet they also want everything in
its proper place. Scientists may be the ultimate "pigeon-holers" for they want
to know not only what goes into the hole, but what the hole is itself.
next
The curious scientist is also the ultimate skeptic for they believe there is an order to the universe, but the scientist is always looking for some unexpected data points that will test the accepted theory. "One day the object will fly up rather than fall to the ground via gravity."
Scientists often have to think outside the box and approach a problem creatively from many different angles. A great imagination and the ability to improvise are important parts of the scientist's arsenal. In the 1963 movie The Prize with Elke Sommer and Paul Newman, who plays the winner of the literature prize and saves Dr. Max Stratman, the famous German-American physicist, played by Edward G. Robinson, when he has a heart attack in his hotel room. Newman quickly improvises by pulling the electric cord from a lamp and applying an electric shock to the physicist, as we might do today with a defibrilator, if one were available. The ability to improvise is a key trait of the scientist, even those who come to Stockholm.
To understand this scientific creativity, some philosophers of science have made an analogy with child development. The idea is that a scientist uses the same strategies for investigating the world as an infant does discovering his/her surroundings for the first time, which makes scientific curiosity part of the basic 'tool kit' of the scientist. Carl Sagan once said, "Everybody starts out as a scientist. Every child has the scientist's sense of wonder and awe."
paraphrased from an article by Michael Schirber in
Aug 1, 2007
Via
the Scientific Method scientists
observe and measure the natural world. From those observational data they infer
the empirical laws (theories) that govern physical and biological processes.
Explanations of these phenomena must make testable
predictions and be falsifiable. That is,
there must be a way to make an observation that could
disprove the explanation. Scientists call the overarching explanation a
theory;
A major difference between the scientist and the lay person is for the scientist
the term theory means truth, while in the everyday
parlance of the lay person, it often means somebody's off-the-cuff guess.
The requirement of falsifiability
rules out supernatural explanations; you cannot disprove, for instance, the
claim that God scattered fossils throughout rock strata to make it look as if
species had evolved over millions of years. God may have done that, but we'll
never know and there is no way to disprove it. In that way, faith is
fundamentally different from science.
Science must be humble for it recognizes that all findings
are tentative (although in many fields the weight of evidence would be
pretty tough to overturn, e.g., gravity) and only as good as the next
experiment; (One day the object will fly up rather than fall to the ground via
gravity). Science labors to distinguish true effects from random chance.
Experiments have "control"
groups to make sure that an effect thought to come from, say, taking a new drug
does not also show up in people who did not take the drug.
Good science distinguishes correlation from causation. If kids who play violent
videogames commit more violence, before you blame the game you'd better be sure
that violence-prone kids are not more drawn to violent games than other kids. If
so, then violent behavior causes the playing of violent videogames, and not the
other way around.
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