Category: Natural Sciences

Verbal Warming: Labels in the Climate Debate

February 20, 2015

Interesting piece that focuses on the power of language and labels when framing a debate and characterizing your position on an issue. Why does it matter whether a person is called a “skeptic” or “denier?” Even if the arguments don’t change, the labels have a powerful influence on characterizing their positions and affecting the way they are perceived.

“The petition asks the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, ‘skeptics,’ and call them ‘climate deniers’ instead.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/science/earth/in-climate-change-whats-in-a-name.html

The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol

February 11, 2015

Here’s an interesting case of scientific research backtracking on a long held view about nutrition. Some things to think about are why science can do so much research to confirm a belief that turns out to be wrong. This article discusses various ways in which scientists come to conclusions including animal testing. What’s also interesting to consider is the role of intuition in belief. Because the plaque that builds up on your arteries is partially composed of cholesterol, it’s intuitively believable that cholesterol in your diet would be bad for you. Even though these warnings about cholesterol will be rescinded, people’s long held beliefs will not  change so quickly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/10/feds-poised-to-withdraw-longstanding-warnings-about-dietary-cholesterol/

Evolution vs. Creationism Debate: Bill Nye v Ken Ham

February 11, 2015

Below are some links about the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham from early 2014 about whether evolution or creationism better explains life on Earth.

Some interesting questions emerge from this debate. How do proponents of evolution and creationism approach knowledge and truth differently? This can be extended to the natural science and religious knowledge systems. Both look to find answers and truth and construct knowledge in fundamentally different ways. The two articles get into this issue a bit. You can watch the debate itself, it’s a bit long but worth watching at least a little bit.

1.Why Bill Nye Won the Creationism Debate Last Night

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/bill-nye-ken-ham-evolution-creationism-refuted

2. Bill Nye v Ken Ham: should scientists bother to debate creationism?

The public debate between Bill Nye and the president of a US creationist museum gives creationism a scientific legitimacy that it isn’t entitled to

http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/feb/05/bill-nye-vs-ken-ham-creationism-science-debate

3.Bill Nye versus Ken Ham: Who won? 

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0205/Bill-Nye-versus-Ken-Ham-Who-won-video

Once Upon a Time, There Was a Big Bang Theory

February 10, 2015

“THE idea once seemed so elegant and simple: The universe began with a bang. Wherever astronomers pointed their telescopes, the distant galaxies were shooting away like stellar shrapnel. And permeating the space in between was a uniform glow of radiation — surely the afterflash of an ancient explosion.

But the theoretical paradise was not to last.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/08/weekinreview/ideas-trends-once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-big-bang-theory.html

THE PARADIGM SHIFTS

February 10, 2015

“If you yourself have used the word without being exactly sure what it means, you are in good company. One of Kuhn’s critics (he had many) claimed to have isolated 22 distinct meanings for paradigm in the book, and Kuhn confessed to a certain elasticity in his use of the term. Nonetheless, it is a genuine and powerful notion, its presence in our language well deserved.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/29/magazine/the-paradigm-shifts.html

Arguing That Historians Can Be Scientists, Too

February 10, 2015

“In recent decades new challenges have been mounted to the supposedly objective study of the past. Most conspicuously, perhaps, postmodernist theory has raised its ultra-skeptical head to allege that objectivity being impossible, there is no truth. Or to apply the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to this matter, history is like a rabbit in the garden at night, running away as soon as it is caught in a beam of light. If that is the case, isn’t the task of trying to determine objectively, scientifically even, what happened in the past an act of arrogant futility?”

The Scientific Method

February 10, 2015

“Too often the ‘scientific method’ is presented in schools and textbooks as a ‘recipe’ for doing science, with numbered steps even! That’s misleading. At the other extreme, someone said that scientific method is ‘Doing one’s damndest with one’s mind.’ I know many have said more profound things about this subject than I will offer, but here’s some informal comments about scientific method presented as a set of practical and general guidlines for doing science. Scientists have learned these through trial and error during the entire history of science.”

https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/scimeth.htm

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

February 10, 2015

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”

–BERTRAND RUSSELL, Study of Mathematics

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html