If there is any science that I am able to promote, I think it is the science of science itself, the science of inquiry, or the scientific method. Stuart Mill
Science built the modern world. He gave us plastics and plastic explosives, cars and tanks, supersonic transportation, and B1 bombers. Science sent a man to the moon and rockets and pens with refills.. Developments in medical science allow us to live twice as long as our ancestors did 150 years ago. But we now have a problem of overcrowding that fails to keep up with the increase in the rate of production, and this threatens us more than any single disease in history. Advances in the physical sciences have given us electricity, computers, lights, cars, and lasers. But for the first time, the combination of nuclear, chemical and biological energy has the potential to cause the extinction of the human race. Discoveries and theories in evolution and cosmology have given us insights into the origins of life and human beings. But for many people, these ideas of the people and the ideologies that followed them threaten personal and religious beliefs, as well as the comfortable status quo.
The part of the world known as the industrialized West is a monument to a scientific revolution that began over 400 years ago. The moment was succinctly captured in a single sentence by one of its founders, Francis Bacon. "Knowledge itself is power". When Bacon wrote these words at the beginning of the 17th century, he compared two elements that enveloped the seed of the scientific revolution. which caused the birth of the scientific method. In his utopian essay "The New Atlantis" he described his goal for the Novon Organon, or the new instrument of science. "The end of man's creation is the knowledge formed of the secret movements of things, which push the limits of the human empire—the effect of all possible things." Through the new device, Beygon felt that humanity would be able to eradicate disease and discover the secret of humanity." For Baygon, the ultimate goal of science is man's rule over the other objects, which man harnesses to his needs and makes nature his slave.
The next Hamshir, with its sexual allusions by Daniel Defoe] summarizes some of the new approaches in 18th century thought related to science and technology.
The exponential growth of scienceThe industrial applications of the technological developments that came out of scientific research were terrifying, without exaggerating. We live in an age of science and technology. The data from that period show that the progress was beyond imagination. The historian of science, Derek de Sole Price, in his book Big Science, Little Science, revealed: “Using a reasonable definition of the role of the scientist, we can say that between 80 and 90 percent of all scientists who have ever lived are living with us today. Alternatively, any young scientist, starting now and looking at the end of his career at a reasonable period of his life, will find that 80 to 90 percent of any scientific work that will be achieved until the end of the period took place in his active life, and the discoveries happened right before his eyes, and 10-20 percent work happened before he could experience them.
De Sola's conclusions are supported by evidence. There are now, for example, well over 100,000 scientific journals published each year, and scientists produce over six million articles so that digesting them is an impossible task. The journal DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION reached the number of over 1,000 different classifications under the heading of pure science. About a dozen specialized professional journals are dedicated to each of them. The graph depicts the increase in the number of journals since the founding of the journal of the Royal Society in 1662 when there were two journals, to the present. Virtually every field of study shows similar exponential growth. Because the number of workers in the field increases, so does the total amount of knowledge, which creates more jobs, attracts more people, and so on. Almost every field of study shows an exponential growth curve. The increase in the number of members of the American Mathematical Society founded in 1888 and the Mathematical Union of America founded in 1915 are a dramatic example of this phenomenon and the rate of people entering the fields of science.
In 1965, the British Minister of Education and Science made an interesting observation.
For more than 200 years, scientists everywhere were a small minority of the population. In Britain today they outnumber the scientists and the army officers. If the rate of increase is the same as the time that has passed from the time of Isaac Newton to the sea, in 200 years every man, woman and child will be scientists, and so will every cow, horse and dog. And mules too.
The growth rate of the means of transportation has shown a geometric progression, most of the change has been made in the last percent of human history. Fernand Braudel tells us that Napoleon did not advance faster than Julius Caesar, but in the last century the increase in the speed of transportation is astronomical (borrowed and literally). Another technological field that has developed is the field of time measurement, clocks, dials and wristwatches have greatly improved their level of accuracy.
Today's world has changed since I was born almost as much as it changed from the days of Julius Caesar to my birth. I was born in the middle of human history.
Pseudoscience in an age of science.Are we living in a scientific age? It may seem so from the examples above, but it is indeed the case, why are there so many pseudo-scientific and anti-scientific traditions around? Religions, myths, superstitions, New Age beliefs, and nonsense of every kind has infiltrated every nook and cranny of popular culture and high culture. It can be said that if we compare today's new age culture to the mystical culture of the Middle Ages, then we are not in such a bad situation, but statistically pseudoscientific beliefs increased greatly in the late 20th century. A 1990 Gallup poll of 1,236 American adults shows percentages of belief in the paranormal.
Astrology: 52% |
ESP: 46%
Witches: 19%
Belief that aliens have landed on Earth*: 22%
The Lost Continent of Atlantis * : 33%
The alleged fact that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time: 41% ||
Noah's flood 65%
Communication with the dead: 42% Ghosts: 35%
People who experienced something sensory 67 percent.
Actually *: 67%
Popular and other beliefs of our time that have no evidence support include: levitation, the Bermuda Triangle, demons, spirits, biorhythms, creationism, psychokinesis, astrology, ghosts, psychic revelations, mists, remote viewing, Cyrillic auras, plant sensations, life after death , monsters, graphology, cryptozoology, psychics, the power of the pyramid, faith medicine, Big Foot, haunted houses, non-stop motion machine, places where there is something that defies gravity, and the most common - the astrology of the time of birth that controls the entire destiny of a person . Other surveys have shown us that these phenomena are not just the domain of a few lunatics on the fringes. They are much more common than many of us think, and this makes one seriously think about how far science has come since the Middle Ages.
In his book Science and the Falling of the Horn of Magic, the mystic Kate Thomas claims that the development of the systematic method of science, progressed together with science since it was created in the 16th and 17th centuries, the understanding that the universe depends on natural laws, eliminated the myths, weakened the belief in the physical effectiveness of prayer, and reduced belief in the possibility of direct divine intervention.
Science alone, however, is not enough to dispel the fascination because the people of that time could engage in science without changing their beliefs and without being able to invent effective technology to replace these beliefs.
Surprisingly, at least to those who hold the thesis and its welfare model of science and theology, Thomas identifies religious belief as the decisive factor in curbing belief in magic, because magic made them wait for an immediate miracle while religion explained that man must help miracles happen before they have to turn to the supernatural.
The people of the skeptical movements throughout the years will find it difficult to agree with Thomas, and the proof of this is the survey described above.
Paranormal beliefs such as belief in ghosts or telepathy probably change very little of the work and life patterns of most of those who believe in them, except in cases where fools part with their money or prescriptions from faith healers, usually no harm is done. However, just as in the field of drugs the question of whether marijuana leads to heroin, so harmless superstitions in spirits and ghosts can lead to dangerous beliefs and dangerous actions.
Believing you were sexually abused by aliens may seem silly and inaccurate, but believing you were sexually abused by a parent or other relative results in someone's imprisonment.
The place where the lack of scientific thinking is particularly effective is in the social sphere. People, groups and nations have tried to solve social problems such as war, crime and poverty for thousands of years, but still the same social ills abound. It seems as if we have failed in our power to remember the past, and are doomed to repeat it. Can we use the scientific method to solve social problems? And if so, should we? Were the so-called social sciences scientific in the analysis of human behavior both in the past and in the present?
The fragmentation of the sciences.
The methods of science have been very successful wherever they have been tried. Let us use them for human affairs bf, apron.
Applying scientific principles to improve the conditions of human existence has a long history of at least 4,500 years in ancient Aram Naharim, when the Sumerians created writing, mathematics, calendar, astronomy, and astrology to improve all aspects of their lives, including agriculture, politics, and religion. The attempt to use scientific methods to understand human behavior, in any case, has a much shorter history, beginning with the principles when the Newtonian spirit was spread to other fields of study that became known later, in the twentieth century, as social sciences.
The social sciences have generally had less success than their biological and physical brethren, and they leave us at the end of the twentieth century with a multitude of problems for which the answer is a race against time.
Wars, revolutions, slavery, poverty, pollution, unemployment, monetary inflation, economic depression, crime, racism, sexism, religious persecution, social conflicts and failed education, are thrust in our faces from every direction with no visible solution in sight. The problem facing the company may have been caused by a single factor. We had the social 18th century, compared to the XNUMXth century - where there were advances in physics, biology, science and technology. In short, we have the technical know-how to self-destruct without social approaches to prevent it.
Why is this? Why did the biological and physical sciences distance themselves from the social sciences, in identifying the causes and predictions and controlling future fluctuations in their fields? There are two possible answers to this: First, the traditional paradigms of the biological and physical sciences, which social scientists try to imitate, are not sufficient for understanding such a complicated subject as human behavior. Secondly. The social sciences (for example psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology) and the historical sciences (cosmology, geology, fossil research, developmental biology, archeology, and human history) differ in method and procedure from the experimental sciences. Despite the fact that the quality of the results is different, history and social sciences in the typical way appear to be soft sciences compared to the hard - experimental sciences, and therefore their conclusions should be less "hard". This is accepted throughout the academy, but those rejected below try to protect their science.
