The Nature of Scientific Knowledge . Who could have possibly thought of our planet as a giant disk with the stars and heavens above, and boulders, tree roots, and other things below? But this was the dominant view of Earth in much of the world before the 2nd century BCE, though the details differed from culture to culture. And it was not explorers who sailed around the world that finally laid the idea to rest, but an accumulation of evidence long before this.

Figure 1: Representation of Eratosthenes' studies demonstrating the curvature of Earth and the geometry used to calculate the circumference of the planet. They observed that the moon appeared to be a sphere and therefore inferred that Earth might also be spherical. Two hundred years later, in the 4th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle observed that the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is always curved, thus providing some of the first evidence that Earth is spherical. In the 3rd century BCE, the mathematician Eratosthenes observed that at noon on the summer solstice in the ancient Egyptian city of Syene, the sun was directly overhead as objects did not cast a shadow.

Eratosthenes was from Alexandria, Egypt, some 5. Using these observations and measurements of shadow length and distance, he inferred that the surface of the Earth is curved and he calculated a remarkably accurate estimate of the circumference of the planet (Figure 1). Some years later, the Greek geographer Strabo added to this evidence when he observed that sailors saw distant objects move downward on the horizon and disappear as they sailed away from them. He proposed that this was because Earth was curved and those sailors were not simply moving further away from the objects but also curving around the planet as they sailed. Figure 2: Earthrise taken on December 2. Apollo 8 mission. In fact, those astronauts had to be absolutely confident that the Earth was a rotating sphere, orbiting the Sun, or they would never have been able to get into orbit.

It is the nature of science and scientific knowledge that gave them that confidence, and understanding the difference between scientific knowledge and other types of knowledge is critical to understanding science itself. What is science? Science consists of two things: a body of knowledge and the process by which that knowledge is produced. This second component of science provides us with a way of thinking and knowing about the world. Commonly, we only see the .

God's plan for human history and defeat of Satan in the seven millennial days of human history. Ear Training / Pitching Exercises plus aural information, books, free pitch recognition software for singers at www.vocalist.org.uk. Cesium chloride, an alkaline mineral salt, is part of a nutrition plan called "high pH therapy" which focuses on using a combined diet and supplement approach to. Learn about scientific thinking and the ways observation and testing add to the body of scientific knowledge. Includes history on the development of scientific thought. The application of spectroscopic analysis for the dating of organic materials is patented (It. 01266808 - G. Matthaes, 1993). Analysis is a noun that is used in many ways and by many fields. It makes sense, since it is "a method of studying the nature of something or of determining its.

We are presented with scientific concepts in statement form – Earth is round, electrons are negatively charged, our genetic code is contained in our DNA, the universe is 1. But there are a number of things that distinguish the scientific process and give us confidence in the knowledge produced through it. So then, what is the scientific process? The scientific process is a way of building knowledge and making predictions about the world in such a way that they are testable. The question of whether Earth is flat or round could be put to the test, it could be studied through multiple lines of research, and the evidence evaluated to determine whether it supported a round or flat planet. Different scientific disciplines typically use different methods and approaches to investigate the natural world, but testing lies at the core of scientific inquiry for all scientists.

Every time a proton collides with an energetic-enough.

As scientists analyze and interpret their data (see our Data Analysis and Interpretation module), they generate hypotheses, theories, or laws (see our Theories, Hypotheses, and Laws module), which help explain their results and place them in context of the larger body of scientific knowledge. These different kinds of explanations are tested by scientists through additional experiments, observations, modeling, and theoretical studies. Thus, the body of scientific knowledge builds on previous ideas and is constantly growing. It is deliberately shared with colleagues through the process of peer review (see our Peer Review module), where scientists comment on each other's work, and then through publication in the scientific literature (see our Utilizing the Scientific Literature module), where it can be evaluated and integrated into the body of scientific knowledge by the larger community. And this is not the end: One of the hallmarks of scientific knowledge is that it is subject to change, as new data are collected and reinterpretations of existing data are made. Major theories, which are supported by multiple lines of evidence, are rarely completely changed, but new data and tested explanations add nuance and detail.

A scientific way of thinking is something that anyone can use, at any time, whether or not they are in the process of developing new knowledge and explanations. Thinking scientifically involves asking questions that can be answered analytically by collecting data or creating a model and then testing one's ideas.

Vocal software artcles, free spectographs, vocal software downloads, reviews for singers. C-7 Home Page C-7 News Consignment Library Products & Services Product Lines Order Search C7.com. Distribution Zeiss Index History News Notes & Interesting Articles. A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” 1964–2009 * Steven Rings. KEYWORDS: Bob Dylan, performance, analysis.

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A scientific way of thinking inherently includes creativity in approaching explanations while staying within the confines of the data. Thinking scientifically does not mean rejecting your culture and background, but recognizing the role that they play in your way of thinking. While testable explanations are a critical component of thinking scientifically, there are other valid ways of thinking about the world around us that do not always yield testable explanations. These different ways of thinking are complementary – not in competition – as they address different aspects of the human experience. It's easy to be confident in the scientific process and our knowledge when we can provide irrefutable evidence, as we were able to do by orbiting around the Earth in a spaceship and taking pictures of an obviously round planet.

But most scientific investigations do not lead to results that are so easily supported, and yet we still rely on and trust the knowledge produced through the process of science. Why do we trust it? Because it works. Science has a long history of creating knowledge that is useful and that gives us more insight into our surroundings.

Take one of the statements above: The universe is 1. Why should we have confidence in this statement? Comprehension Checkpoint. The scientific process is a way of building knowledge and making predictions that.

The age of the universe. How old is the universe?

How can we possibly know the age of something that was created not simply before human history, but before our planet came into being? This is a difficult question to address scientifically, so much so that through the early 2. Machines and entropy.

The first indication that the universe may not have existed for all of time came from an unlikely source: the study of engines. In the 1. 82. 0s, Sadi Carnot was a young officer on leave from the French military. While taking classes at various institutions in Paris, he became interested in industrial problems, and was surprised to see that no scientific studies had been undertaken on the steam engine, a relatively new invention at the time and a poorly understood one. Carnot believed that engines could be better understood – a characteristic common to scientists is that they work to better understand things – and so he studied the transfer of energy in engines.

He recognized that no engine could be 1. Figure 3). Carnot published his ideas in a book titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power, which presented a mathematical description of the amount of work that could be generated by an engine, called the Carnot cycle (Carnot, 1. Figure 3: An infrared image of a running engine showing the temperature of various parts of the engine. Higher temperatures (red and yellow portions of the image) indicate greater heat loss. The loss of heat represents a loss of efficiency in the engine, and a contribution to the increasing entropy of the universe.

But others began to realize the importance of his work and built upon it. Serial Number Dating Bear Bow on this page. One of those scientists was Rudolf Clausius, a German physicist who showed that Carnot's principle was not limited to engines, but in fact applied to all systems in which there was a transfer of energy. Clausius' application of an explanation for one phenomenon to many others is also characteristic of science, which assumes that processes are universal. In 1. 85. 0, Clausius published a paper in which he developed the second law of thermodynamics, which states that energy always flows from a high energy state (for example, a system that is hot) to a low energy state (one that is cold) (Clausius, 1.

In later work, Clausius coined the term entropy to describe the energy lost from a system when it is transferred, and as an acknowledgement of the pioneering work of Sadi Carnot in providing the foundation for his discoveries, Clausius used the symbol S to refer to the entropy of a system. But how do engines and entropy relate to the age of the universe? In 1. 86. 5, Clausius published another paper that restated the Second Law of Thermodynamics as . In other words, the stars themselves would have burned out long ago, dissipating their heat into surrounding space. The fact that there are still active stars must mean that the universe has existed for a finite amount of time, and was created at some specific point in time. Perhaps the age of that point in time could be determined?

Comprehension Checkpoint. Science assumes that. Redshift and the Doppler effect. At about the same time, an Austrian physicist by the name of Christian Doppler was studying astronomy and mathematics.

Doppler knew that light behaved like a wave, and so began to think about how the movement of stars might affect the light emitted from those stars. In a paper published in 1. Doppler proposed that the observed frequency of a wave would depend on the relative speed of the wave's source in relation to the observer, a phenomenon he called a .