History and Science

[satsobek]

I get the distinct impression nobody bothered to click on the link to a description of 'scientific method'. Wink I also notice that it was the scientist who bothered to comment on the historical theory I put, and ironically none of the historians Very Happy

hehee. I actually (eventually) did go read the wikipedia pages on "science", "humanities", "soft science", "history" and "empirical" because I felt like I needed to understand the terms a bit better myself. Ok, no substitute for "real" research, but better than nothing. :lol:

How do you judge astronomy to be emperical? Isn't physics about theories mostly, too?

I think that's something that scientists in any of the highly theoretical fields struggle with every single day -- it is hard to directly prove a lot of those things. Nobody can visit a black hole of course! What astronomers CAN do in such cases is come up with a hypothesis, predict a certain set of behaviors that would hold true if their hypothesis is correct, and then test to see if it works. It won't prove things absolutely, but they've just created observable repeatable tests that support their conclusion. The more different kinds of tests that can be done to point to the same conclusion, the more sound the theory is considered.

Just because science contains theories doesn't make it any less empirical. To quote wikipedia on the subject:

In scientific usage, a theory does not mean an unsubstantiated guess or hunch, as it can in everyday speech. A theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena. It originates from or is supported by experimental evidence. In this sense, a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations which is predictive, logical and testable. As such, scientific theories are essentially the equivalent of what everyday speech refers to as facts.

Something has to be pretty well tested in science even to reach the status of "theory". If I recall correctly even Newton's famous statements about gravity are still technically considered "theories", even though nearly everyone now accepts gravity as a physical truth. The only real "fact" according to science is that you can observe what appears to be something falling towards the ground!"

Same with Sociology, Psychology, Medicine, anything that has to do with people. Are those not Science either?

I guess I should have been more clear before. It's true, these subjects are about studying people, but I'd say they tend to focus on the testable, experimentable aspects. You probably won't find them going around trying to figure out why one specific person thought the way they did or chose to do things that they did, because one person is not enough to make a good test, nor enough to really reveal any larger truth about people in general.
Some historians do this too, but there are also countless very famous historians who have made their life's work studying just one person and trying to understand their life and why they did what they did. This doesn't make them less of a good historian, but I wouldn't say their work follows a "traditional" scientific methodology.

One of the reasons I'm very touchy about this is the confrontation with far too many people who think they can do a 'Dan Brown' and write a history book themselves. They disregard all source criticism and disregard all methodology even more. Like I said, then you get nutters who claim Julius Caesar stood model for Jesus Christ. This claim of history being not a science does not help.

Probably just how scientists feel when guys go around claiming they can prove UFO's exist, or that their are ghosts, or that people have telepathic abilities. These people usually claim that they can "scientifically" test these claims, but generally they too have no regard for real scientific methodology, and tend pick and choose facts to suit their own ideas. Regardless of your chosen field, there are always going to be idiots out there who make it look stupid, and uneducated people who are taken in by these silly claims.