Wednesday 18 January 2012

probare...scientia... probe knowledge

We all know of the world in which we live, but we only know a certain extent scientifically speaking. We have breakthroughs since the birth of science, but we cannot explain everything. I wanted to take some time early to elaborate that I will not be taking theological topics to describe the world in its creation and how it is sustained.



There is a common misconception amongst many people science is truth, but let me encourage you that science in and of itself is not truth. We make observations of aspects of the world (watching gravity when dropping a ball), and we call these facts which contribute to our data; it is when we provide an explanation of the data that we manifest mental images that collaborate all of our data in hopes to discover why X has happened, and this is called a hypothesis. When you produce a hypothesis, you must try to disprove it, for if you are unable to disprove it then it is not science. Another term to be introduced is the scientific word "theory", yet when I say theory there are many of you who may say,"Oh.. evolution... it is just a theory". This is a huge misconception of what the scientific term theory means; many people believe the term theory to mean a guess or an imperfect fact.  It is when you try to prove your hypothesis wrong, but it stands against many tests, leaving it to be to be very credible and thoroughly tested through many rounds and multiple types of testing. After this, it may be known as a theory. Facts are the earth's data, and theories are the interpretation of those facts.

Science deals with the natural world, looking for natural causes for natural phenomenon. It's not a perfect system, yet it is the best means that we have to find the true nature of nature. In science, we like to say that we will try to prove something by running sets of tests,analyze data, so on,and so forth (you get the idea). The term prove comes from the latin "probare" meaning to probe. Thus, we probe the truth in search of truth: we are very aware of our perceptive faculties, and our flaws, so you may often see error bars in science . These bars will give an approximation to maximum error, but not the actual error. As I stated earlier, science isn't perfect, its simply the best proposed mechanism we have. The central dogma of science is that there is no central dogma, because the outcomes from scientific studies can be overturned. Uncertainty and doubt are essential to science. It accepts that we as humans have flaws and addresses it correctly. All advancements come from previous advancements.



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