Logic - Week 8

Inductive Logic (Generalising)
Definition: Reasoning from the particular to the general.

When the electrons were shot through the two slits and formed a wave pattern, instead of two individual lines on the back board, it was assumed that the electrons were interfering with one another and thus forming the pattern. Yet when a measuring device was used to observe this occurrence near the slits, the electrons in fact changed their paths and formed the two lines that they were originally meant to form.

The idea was proposed as matter is spread out in space, wavy, that is is very difficult to say where it is and what it may do next. This was quantum physics, that there is a huge uncertainty as the effects are so small and changeable that it is stated that nature is a game of chance. There is a real limit to what scientists can know with absolute certainty.

Every time Einstein tried to make sense and reason of certain ideas, people would find ways around it to prove him wrong. He tried extremely hard to show that quantum physics was wrong, yet he did not succeed. Much of physics is probable and unable to reason with.

Deductive Logic (Narrowing down)
Definition: Reasoning from a general premise that is either known or assumed to be true.

An idea that was presented in the first video was that when marbles are shot through a slit, they hit the board in the same line as the slit, then when shot through two slits it forms two lines. When this was applied to quantum physics, electrons were shot through one slit and sure enough it formed one line. So it was assumed that electrons, being tiny particles of matter, would also form two lines. Yet this was proved false. It formed a series of lines, as a wave would.

It was assumed, especially by Einstein that the outcomes of an experiment could not be completely predictable "I can not believe that God plays dice with the universe".

Inside a vacuum electrons perform like solid particles, but when placed in a solid, they perform like waves. Thus was the idea of quantum physics. There came the idea of the particle wave durability of electrons. The transmitter was created for this specific purpose...it was a process of applying quantum theory to practical problems.

Scientific Knowledge - Week 5

Notes
a. What different ways of building knowledge were described?
Ideas, achievements and results. Outside and inside the laboratory. Religious and political. Data gatherer. Plotting. "Great observing logs of raw data".

b. What role has rational thought played in the development of science?
"Science needs evidence". No longer is science just based on theories and information, it has become about data. "Information and analysis from fresh observations". "A commitment to cold, hard, obstinate facts".

c. What other ways of knowing have played roles in scientific discovery?
Astronomy, an understanding/exploration of the cosmos. Mathematics. Theories. Early civilisations had already begun to produce ideas about things that they could not understand, such as heaven. Greek cosmology.

"What surprises me about the way science has progressed"


Science has progressed immensely over the years. For the human race to have started out from nothing but thoughts and concepts and built on that to gradually form "cold, hard, obstinate facts" is quite an incredible feat. What I find very fascinating is how strong the sense of conviction that scientific facts give the majority of people (including myself). It seems to me that we seem very dependent on the idea that if something can be proven scientifically then the likelihood of it being true is very very high. Yet if we think about it...what is science and scientific fact? Are they not all still born from thoughts and concepts of the human mind, and is the human mind that is most prone to failures...and to successes. So how is it that we can be so adamantly convinced that a certain scientific statement is true?

I suppose that science is really all about experimentation, trial and error, and observations. It is about having a theory, putting the theory into practice and then having the results agree with your theory. Then being able to explain a reason for the results and to compare them with the results that others have gained. (As I take chemistry this is the main aspect of science that we focus on). This idea seems quite plausible. That if something can be proven, as in shown to succeed and if a great number of people agree on this, then it must be true. So this is science.

What still continues to astound me though is how science has built upon itself over the years. That it has progressed from a nothing to a whole full concept, subject, system, a belief. I am in awe of the people who gave birth to science or who were the ones that lay down the scaffolding and those who placed the first bricks of what is science today. For example now in chemistry we are learning about atoms, molecules, nucleuses and all this stuff, and with this we can experiment and increase our understanding, but it was the people before us that first discovered nucleuses and the people before them that discovered atoms. Science is really about generations and generations of people building and adding on to scientific facts, which could not be achieved without the previous scientific fact being proved and placed.

Thus as they say, science is truly "standing on the shoulders of giants"