Scientific explanations

Steffensky, M., Parchmann, I., Schmidt, S. (2005). Die Teilchen saugen das Aroma aus dem Tee - Beispiele und Erklarungsansatze fur Missverstandnisse zwischen Alltagsvorstellungen und fachlichen Erklarungen. [The Particles are sucking the Aroma out of the Tea. Examples and Explanations for Misunderstanding between Daily Life Conceptions and Scientific Explanations] Chemie in unserer Zeit, 39(4), 274-278. 

Research had helped Du Pont convert from explosives to consumer goods. The company opened the first modern research laboratory in the American chemical industry in 1902. By 1921, the United States had more than 500 industrial research laboratories eager to duplicate goods previously imported from Germany. Most American industrial laboratories applied known scientific facts to practical problems, however. Thus, Du Pont s offer to Carothers embodied the first attempt by an American chemical manufacturer to discover new fundamental scientific explanations for natural phenomena. If Carothers was willing to work for industry, Du Pont was an attractive choice. 

Biologists are unlikely to be interested in philosophical disputes about the nature of explanation. Regrettably, they will have to be, if they wish to decide intelligently about whether to embrace a reductionist or nonreductionist methodology. For the dispute between reductionists and antireductionists turns very largely on the nature of scientific explanation. If there is no consensus on the nature of explanation, there will be no way to adjudicate the dispute between reductionism and antireductionism. 

Given the intensity of discussion of both creation and intelligent design, both of which propose an outside influence on evolution which has no simple scientific explanation, we must make our position clear. As far as we can see the directional character of evolution of our ecosystem, illustrated by the cone on the cover of this book, requires only one act for which we can see no explanation. We know of no cause of the Big Bang and the limitations it imposed on the cosmos observed in the laws of Nature. It is these laws alone which we use in our analysis. The laws contain possibilities both of systematic development which is the centre of our discussion and of random events. The first we relate, in the evolution of life, to chemotypes and the second to the appearance of species within chemotypes, see the cover of this book. At no time in this chapter, or in any other chapter do we invoke any other kind of activity. 

Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation. New York Free Press. 

In early twentieth century, plastics were largely obtained from natural products and the industry was a minor one. Most of the plastics were discovered by trial and error and no scientific explanation was available for their properties. 

I originally conceived this book as a study of epistemological questions about differences between chemistry and physics, namely, how chemists aims and methods in scientific explanation have been different from physicists and how these aims and methods have overlapped. This problem remains a principal focus of the book is there a way of seeing and describing the natural world that has been consistently "chemical" If so, how has it compared to a "physical" way of understanding the natural world Have chemistry and physics been commensurable or incommensurable sciences Answering these questions historically leads to sets of answers that are specific to time and place to distinct texts, individuals, schools, and traditions to disciplines and disciplinary histories. 

Shared values include commitment to the worthiness of peer review and judgment by rational consensus. Shared values also include concepts like the definition of proof, the principle of economy, and accepted schema of analogies, models, and abstract representation that are means of scientific explanation. These shared values are further imparted and reinforced through the ongoing traditions and specific research schools of the discipline. Shared prob-... 

By and large, a pejorative view of the methodological sophistication of chemical science has prevailed, notably, in comparison to physics. The structure of scientific explanation in chemistry often has been deemed child s play, or kitchen work. Chemistry frequently is characterized as a handmaiden, "like the maid occupied with daily civilization she is busy with fertilizers, medicines, glass, [and] insecticides. .. for which she dispenses the recipes."3 The Toulouse physicist Henri Bouasse enraged his colleague Paul Sabatier, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1912, by jibing that chemists only aim to "faire la cuisine."4... 

More radically, it can be argued that chemists recognized before most physicists the conventional character of the basic definitions and premises of scientific explanation systems, an argument usually identified in physics with Heinrich Hertz, Henri Poincare, and Edouard LeRoy at the end of the nineteenth century. And finally, chemists recognized early on that multiple explanations are superior to a simple but wrong explanation. In short, chemistry had a principle of complementarity long before physics did. 

I saw that there is an interphase between consciousness active in the world and consciousness active in the central nervous system, whose intermediary is the body. That interphase is language. To use language, consciousness informs the brain to inform the body to impart coherency to the random motion of the air molecules near but outside the body. This coherency is supplied by consciousness in the form of a word. None of the physical laws operating on the air molecules have been violated, because the coherent pattern of behavior of the molecules is due to an input of energy—an input of energy whose release was initiated by an act of conscious will. Will is not an item in the toolkit of scientific explanation. 

Solvent extraction is used in nnmerons chemical industries to produce pure chemical compounds ranging from pharmaceuticals and biomedicals to heavy organics and metals, in analytical chemistry and in environmental waste purification. The scientific explanation of the distribution ratios observed is based on the fundamental physical chemistry of solute-solvent interaction, activity factors of the solutes in the pure phases, aqueous complexation, and complex-adduct interactions. Most university training provides only elementary knowledge about these fields, which is unsatisfactory from a fundamental chemical standpoint, as well as for industrial development and for protection of environmental systems. Solvent extraction uses are important in organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry, and in chemical engineering, theoretical as well as practical in this book we try to cover most of these important fields. 

While acknowledging tongue in cheek, consider for a moment the entrails strategy. Other oracle methods rely purely on magic. It is difficult to postulate even an indirect scientific explanation of the predictive power of tea leaves, clover, or the crystal ball, but if a goatherd approaches and asks for a prediction of his future, examining the health of one or more... 

Some elements have several different forms. In the case of carbon, charcoal was the only recognized form until early in the nineteenth century. The name carbon actually comes from the Eatin word carbo, meaning charcoal. In 1812, Sir Humphry Davy used sunlight to set a diamond on fire. This demonstration, combined with his scientific explanation, proved that diamonds were made of pure carbon. Around the same time, Davy also showed that coal was another form of carbon. Graphite, which is the lead in pencils, is... 

See Cad Hempel (1965) Aspects of Scientific Explanation, New York Free Preas, pp. 97-4 . 

The two problems we have just discussed add up to a weakness in the best-known theory of scientific explanation, that proposed by Carl Hempel. He argues that explanation amounts to logical deduction of the event to be explained, with general laws and statements of initial conditions as the premises. One objection is that the general laws might reflect correlation, not causation. Another is that the laws, even if genuinely causal,... 

The issues of scientific explanation discussed here are explored in many books on the philosophy of science. Carl Hempel s classic Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York Free Press, 1965) remains a fine starting point. A good study of causation is Tom Beauchamp and Alexander Rosenberg s Hume and the Problem of Causation (New York Oxford University Press,... 

There yet remains considerable amounts of art to coacervative microencapsulation. Here art is best described as a phenomenon awaiting a scientific explanation. In coacervation the kind of addition and the rate of and order of addition are extremely critical. In general, the slower the process the better it is for coacervative encapsulation. It is the intuitive feel that encapsulators practice that it frequently termed "art. ... 

Molecular descriptors may provide fundamental and scientific explanations of variations in the activity mechanism due to the structure of molecules. QSAR models can provide insight into kinetic mechanisms of organic compounds, and some of the design uncertainty associated with SCWO kinetics can be reduced. By using appropriate molecular descriptors, then, the results of QSAR models for SCWO could be used to determine the oxidation rate constants of organic compounds of structure similar to the training set chemicals of the QSAR model without experiments. 

Theory A highly reliable and well-tested scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon. While laypeople often define a theory as a hunch, guess, or mere speculation, scientists use the term hypothesis to describe a suggested explanation or an untested idea. 

Justification of the limits. This should be a logical and scientific explanation of how limits were established. 

There is no general recognition of MCS in the medical establishment, because of a lack of consensus about whether or not it is a distinct medical condition. The confusion is caused by a lack of a conclusive medical-scientific explanation for MCS, although several possible causes and mechanisms have been proposed. See entry 27-... 

At this time (2009) there is no conclusive medical-scientific explanation for MCS and some controversy still exists over whether MCS is physical or psychosomatic (see also entry 28). The fol-... 

P. K. Basu, Scientific explanation in the history of chemistry the Priestley-Lavoisier debate , Diss. Abstr. Int., 1993, 53 3937-A7. 

Instructional models. .. seek to engage students in important scientific questions, give students opportunities to explore and create their own explanations, provide scientific explanations and help students connect these to their own ideas, and create opportunities for students to extend, apply, and evaluate what they have learned. 

His major contributions were twofold. First, he convincingly championed chemistry as an important part of the new natural philosophy of the seventeenth century. More precisely, Boyle argued that chemical philosophy and corpuscular philosophy provided important support for one another. We will soon consider the nature of corpuscular philosophy. For now, it is enough to note that it offered mechanical explanations, based on the behavior of corpuscles. These corpuscles might be aggregations, groups, or clumps of atoms, which were in principle divisible. Alternatively, they might simply be individual atoms, which by definition were indivisible. Boyle made chemistry compatible with the new, fashionable, and dominant kind of scientific explanation. His second major contribution, partly borrowed from Starkey, was the development of an experimental metbod m chemistry that made it fit into the new... 

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