In 1888, Darwin also defined science: "Science is the arrangement of facts, the discovery of patterns, and the drawing of conclusions." Darwin's definition points out the connotation of science, that is, facts and laws. Science should discover facts unknown to people and use them as a basis to seek truth from facts, rather than pure fantasy that is divorced from reality. As for laws, they refer to the inherent essential connections between objective things. Therefore, science is a system of knowledge about the nature and movement laws of various things in the objective world that is based on practice, tested by practice and rigorously logically demonstrated.
Science is a system of knowledge about nature, society and thinking. It is produced and developed to meet the needs of people's production struggles and class struggles. 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. In addition, science seeks to explain things by revealing the laws that govern them.
Science is the phenomena and laws of the universe. The laws set by the universe will not negate each other. For example, the universe will not stipulate that its regulations are wrong. The universe will not stipulate that it can travel through time and space, and it will not stipulate that it cannot travel through time and space. Among these two regulations, The universe can only dictate that one is right and the other is wrong. Traveling through time itself is a refutation, believing that the science of traveling through time is superstition.
The laws set by the universe are not meaningless. For example, the universe does not stipulate that nothing exists in the universe, and an unchanging existence is meaningless. Therefore, objects in the universe can move and life can exist.
A hypothesis can be tested simply by gathering information from other sources, by additional observations, or more often by designing an experiment. Experiments allow scientists to test hypotheses by recreating an event. There are often multiple variables in an event. The more variables there are, the more difficult it is to conduct the experiment. Therefore, controlled experiments are needed. Classic controlled experiments are conducted in two groups, one group is called the control group; the other group is called the experimental group. Scientists often do not accept the results of a single experiment because they may just be random events that have no causal relationship with the experimental variables. This experiment can only be trusted if a large number of repeated experiments show an obvious causal relationship.
One of the core features of the scientific method is communication. In most cases, the results of scientific research must be subject to supervision and review by others interested in the research. Communication occurs among people and a step in scientific inquiry, including publishing articles and making public ideas and ideas.
A scientist must first be a healthy skeptic. He must distinguish between facts and claims. Whether something is scientific depends on whether it is supported by a lot of rigorous evidence, not whether it sounds loud. In addition, scientists must pay close attention to detail and have a strong ethical sense of honesty.
The fundamental difference between science and non-science is whether a hypothesis can be tested. For example, we can assume that if the Communist Party of China was killed in the Xi'an Incident, the Anti-Japanese War would have won faster. This assumption cannot be verified, so history is not a science. However, history, literature, sociology, economics, and philosophy all have their own logical core ideas. At the same time, science and non-science are not static. For example, economics uses a large number of scientific methods to assist in explaining economic phenomena. Generally speaking, it is still far from science.
Pseudoscience is not science, but it uses the appearance of "scientific" and the language of "scientific" to convince, confuse and mislead people into thinking that it is scientific and credible. They cannot withstand the test of real science and they belong to the proper subset of non-science. . For example, nutrition is indeed a science, and many people use nutrition under the guise of advertising nutritional products. 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. In most cases, the effects of those health care products are far less impressive than their advertisements claim, and our bodies do not need these health care products as advertised. In these advertisements, carefully selected out-of-context scientific information (amino acids, vitamins, minerals are essential for the human body) does make people feel that these products are very credible. In fact, most people's daily diet contains sufficient amounts of nutrients without the need to take additional supplements. It should be noted that these health products are often labeled as natural to promote that they are non-toxic, have no side effects and have significant effects. However, curaretoxin, cinnamon, nicotine, and nicotine are also purely natural substances, and I don’t think anyone is willing to add them to their recipes.
From the definition of science, we know that it is a method of finding information to solve problems, so science can only solve problems that are based on objective reality. Issues such as morality, value judgment, social orientation, and personal attitudes cannot be solved using scientific methods, but it is also absolutely impossible to ignore science in order to pursue the spiritual world. At the same time, science is also limited by people's ability to explore the essence of natural phenomena. People make mistakes, and people sometimes draw incorrect conclusions due to a lack of information or misunderstandings. Science itself has the ability to self-correct. When we acquire new knowledge, we must change or abandon the original wrong ideas. Therefore, it seems that geocentric theory is a wrong conclusion. At that time, it was constructed through scientific methods and was only limited by human observation ability.
For any research method to be considered a scientific method, it must be objective (scientists cannot have different explanations for a single result produced by the scientific method or cannot change the occurrence of the result). Another basic expectation is that there must be complete documentation to support the research, and the research method must be carefully reviewed by a third party and confirmed that the method can be reproduced.
It is generally understood that science is the pursuit of natural laws. An important standard for scientific laws is that there must be no counterexamples to a certain situation. If any objectively existing phenomenon that can be repeated contradicts existing scientific laws, it is declared that this scientific law has certain limitations.
The scientific method explains natural phenomena using reproducible methods. Generate thought experiments or hypotheses from predictions. Predictions are made before confirming experiments or observations and are used to demonstrate that no intervention was involved. And disconfirmation of predictions is proof of progress. Scientific researchers develop hypotheses to explain natural phenomena and then design experiments to test these hypotheses, which require simulating natural phenomena under controlled conditions (in observational sciences, such as astronomy or geology, predictable observations can replace verification experiments ). Overall, the scientific method can solve extremely innovative problems without being subject to subjective bias (also known as confirmation bias).
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