How Science Is Done

Q In your experience, have you seen any changes in how science is done ... 

Those two problems are, indeed, interdependent. Popper considered the issue of how science is done a matter of interpretation (Popper, 1976 80) the issue of how science should be done he deemed a matter of sociology (Popper, 1974a 1036). Yet Popper stressed repeatedly that a philosophy of science must take into account the way science is actually practiced (Popper 1979 134). Beyond the mere cultivation of a critical attitude, the question thus becomes whether the logic of systematics matches in any way the logic of scientific discovery as analyzed and formalized by Popper (1976). 

Demonstrations Demonstrations are quite familiar activities in science class-rooms. Their merits and demerits have been discussed at length in the Cone of experiences they have been placed on the fourth band from the base because it is essentially a process of observing. It differs from the first three bands, which are essentially doing. Demonstrations are used to show how something is done or not done. When demonstration is followed by doing on the part of students, it becomes very much meaningful. 

Over the years people have switched their beliefs from the explanations of the gods of former times to the explanations of the gods of modern times, the scientists and statisticians It Is easy to see how people have done this Modern people began to believe In numbers and data because they represented nature so well. The theories of science and statistics were explained, and the Ideas of science and statistics became better founded and entrenched In their thinking. However one mistake was made and that was a big one facts and data were taken as truth and reality. 

Just how one decides whether one is in the mood for broiled salmon or roast duck isn t the concern of the decision sciences, at least not unless the way it is done turns out to conflict in some fashion with the rest of the model of rational choice. It sometimes seems to me - to me... 

Biochemistry has pushed Darwin s theory to the limit. It has done so by opening the ultimate black box, the cell, thereby making possible our understanding of how life works. It is the astonishing complexity of subcellular organic structures that has forced the question, How could all this have evolved To feel the brunt of the question—and to get a taste of what s in store for us—let s look at an example of a biochemical system. An explanation for the origin of a function must keep pace with contemporary science. Let s see how science s explanation... 

Alan MacDiarmid (1927-2007) once said "Chemistry is about people" In this spirit, full names and birth and death dates are given to all the scientists quoted in this book such brief historical data may help illuminate how and when science was done. I have resisted mentioning who was a Nobel prize winner too many to list, and some worthy scientists—for example, Mendeleyeff, Eyring, Edison, Slater, and Tesla—were not honored. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to many people who have educated me over several decades, as live teachers and silent authors. In particular, I am indebted to Professor Willard Frank Libby (1908-1980), who taught us undergraduates at UCLA to love current research problems and led us into quite a few wild-goose chases Professor Harden Marsden McConnell (1927- ), who led us at Caltech and Stanford by example to see what are... 

Before beginning our quest for an understanding of chemistry, let s look at how science in general is done. There is no one correct way to do science. Different scientific disciplines have developed different procedures, and different scientists approach their pursuit of knowledge in different ways. Nevertheless, most scientific work has certain characteristics in common. We can see them in the story of how scientists discovered the first treatment for Parkinson s disease, a neurological condition that progressively... 

Science is rarely done in a vacuum. When an experiment is conducted, the scientist often has some notion about what the outcome will be. In modeling, the analyst may have some idea of what the model parameters will be. For example, at the very least, one can make the assumption that the rate constants in a compartmental model are all positive—that the rate constants cannot be negative. The section on Constrained Optimization in this chapter illustrated how such constraints can be incorporated into the fitting process. However, sometimes the analyst has even more knowledge about the value of a model parameter, such as the distribution of the parameter. Such a distribution is referred to as the prior distribution. For example, suppose in a previous study clearance was estimated to be normally distributed with a mean of 45 L/h and a standard deviation of 5 L/h. 

My primary aim is to show how physics and chemistry interact in giving us our current understanding of chemical bond. I want to establish the factual aspects of the relation between the two sciences without any reference, initially, to what has been speculated about that relation by other investigators. Once this is done, I will show that the laws of physics relevant to chemistry are statements of limitations. They define a boundary within which chemical laws and theories are valid and beyond which they become meaningless. Within the boundaries, the laws of physics do not dictate what is actual nor do they provide a clear path connecting the theories and the laws of physics with those applicable to chemistry. The latter have to be established, among the many possibilities within the boundaries set by physics, by chemical research. 

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