Welcome to Thursday Coffee Hour. This is an open topic thread so help yourself to the goodies and sit a spell and let us know what is new with you. We keep hearing politicians say "I'm not a scientist" and I thought maybe we should discuss what a scientist is. According to the dictionary:
sci·en·tist ˈsīən(t)əst/ noun a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences.
A scientist explores and examines aspects of the physical world to discover how things work. They work according to the scientific method. Wise Geek has one of the best explanations that I have seen on what that means.
The scientific method is a way of acquiring knowledge through experiment. It is designed to cancel out standard human biases in reasoning by encouraging reproducibility and cross-checking. Scientists form hypotheses, or educated guesses, about aspects of the world, then test them. These experiments must be readily reproducible, so that other scientists can cross-check the data. After thorough testing, a hypothesis may be supported or contradicted by the data.
When a body of complementary hypotheses are proven correct, they may be integrated into a sort of "meta-hypothesis" called a theory. Theories can never be proven absolutely correct, and according to scientists, nothing can. This is where scientists are at odds with theists and spiritualists, who believe that through prayer or meditation one can access absolute truths. According to the scientific method, no theory is sacred, and even if thousands of experiments support it, one can still prove it wrong.
If a theory is extremely well confirmed over a long period of time and taken for granted among the vast majority of the scientific community, it acquires the status of a natural law or physical law. Physical laws, like “gravity makes things fall” are about as close to absolute certainty that we can obtain about the universe. As theories, especially solid empirical theories, make detailed quantitative predictions about the phenomena they seek to explain, it can be quite straightforward to refute them if they lack predictive power.
Some scientists are household names including:
· Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity
· Charles Darwin and evolution
· Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine
· Galileo Galilei and his telescope
· Marie Currie and radioactivity
Some scientists like Nicholas Tesla should be better known then they are. Whether household names or not scientists have labored to discover new knowledge, and test and retest what they are observing to make sure it adheres to the scientific method.
My personal heroes are the men and women who popularize science. Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are trying to explain science to a new generation of people. It is with their help that we hopefully can overcome the willful ignorance of the "I'm not a scientist but." We need to teach our young how to think and how to test out theories. We need scientists not deniers who refuse to understand science.
We Are Made Of Starstuff