"Bad Science" Column. Case Studies in Science. Error and the Nature of Science. March 2004 How science works is the key to understanding its concepts. Einstein predicted in 1907 that light bends in a gravitational field. Today, telescopes on Earth can pick up the light bending around a massive object in space. Source: NASA’s hubble.org. Scientific information abounds. New findings emerge daily. Imagine a study linking vaccinations to child autism: Should you believe it? Profiling the Nature of Science Observation comes from different angles. What features of the nature of the science are most important to know?
Scientists think critically about claims. Scientists back their findings with multiple lines of evidence. Observation is sometimes enhanced by quantitative measurement, by comparison—especially with controls that isolate the effect of individual variables or help distinguish correlation from causation—and by graphical representation and statistical analysis summarizing patterns in the data and the chances for error.Data does not speak for itself. Material Social. The Art of Teaching Science. Science For All Americans. Chapter 1: THE NATURE OF SCIENCE Over the course of human history, people have developed many interconnected and validated ideas about the physical, biological, psychological, and social worlds.
Those ideas have enabled successive generations to achieve an increasingly comprehensive and reliable understanding of the human species and its environment. The means used to develop these ideas are particular ways of observing, thinking, experimenting, and validating. These ways represent a fundamental aspect of the nature of science and reflect how science tends to differ from other modes of knowing. It is the union of science, mathematics, and technology that forms the scientific endeavor and that makes it so successful. Although each of these human enterprises has a character and history of its own, each is dependent on and reinforces the others. This chapter lays out recommendations for what knowledge of the way science works is requisite for scientific literacy. The World Is Understandable.