SCIENCE..... what is it??

[Enoch2021]

 

 

 

"Ultimately all tests we can do involve observations"

 

Of course you LOOK @ the Tests.  Are you attempting to somehow equivocate Observations?  To start or to ask the question (hypothesis) you need to OBSERVE a Phenomenon.  You can't ask a (Rationale and Reasonable) question without Identifying something that you didn't Observe.

No I don't mean this in a trivial or silly sense.

 

Here's an example. Take the Large Hadron Collider, a massive experiment. Certainly, this is a very controlled environment and I am guessing you would agree that, for instance, the discovery of the Higgs boson was a genuine scientific discovery? But I am wondering what is, conceptually, different between that and say, looking at the product of reactions that happen between nuclei in the atmosphere and incoming cosmic rays. From what you seem to be saying, if we don't set the experiment up, it cannot, in principle, produce scientific evidence, but what is the qualitative difference between a collision happening in the LHC and one that occurs between a cosmic ray proton and the upper atmosphere?

 

Ultimately we can only probe nature in a more careful way. The LHC is the world's largest microscope. It is helpful that we can produce an enormous amount of data with it, have tight controls over the environment and so on. However, for each individual interaction there's a lot that cannot be controlled. Such things are accounted for in the statistics. But I cannot see what the *conceptual* difference is between what happens there and what happens in the upper atmosphere, if people are looking very closely. There's more controlled observation. There's less controlled observation.All of it though is to observe what happens in such and such conditions, with greater precision and accuracy.

 

The most successful theory yet is quantum mechanics. Quantum electrodynamics is wildly successful, predicting the value to 12 decimal places. Theorists calculate what the theory says it should be, then experiments are set up to see if that is indeed the case. If it isn't, then it's known where the theory breaks, where additional factors matter, which tells us a lot about nature. But there again is something we set out to observe about nature. It's true, we can make the query repeatedly at our leisure if we have an experimental set up in a lab. That's the benefit to doing it that way, and it's not a small benefit.-But, it's not conceptually different from observing things in conditions 'as they are', anymore than an individual hadron collision in the LHC is somehow different from one in the atmosphere, if both are being observed by careful human researchers.

 

 

Sorry busy morning,

 

You go through this and ask yourself these questions, is it:

 

Observable

Measurable/Testable

Repeatable

Falsifiable

 

If so, Good to Go!!  If Not, then it's not SCIENCE!

[LookingForAnswers]

I understand that the truth can be painful, but it really is for the best. What a 7th grader leaned about the scientific method is a simplified view made for a 7th grader to grasp, not for adults to use for their basis of defining science. A 7th grader is taught certain things in math class yet when they get to calculus they discover things are not that simple. Do yourself a favor and move past middle school definitions