by Gregory Wrightstone
As a physicist, John Droz holds in high regard the Scientific Method, a 400-year-old approach to investigating reality. Rooted in Isaac Newton’s work, which included creation of the calculus, the Scientific Method has long underpinned examination of the physical world and technological advancement.
Quite understandable it is, then, that Droz, who holds degrees in mathematics and physics, was prompted to do some investigating of his own after learning that his state of North Carolina had abandoned the teaching of the Scientific Method for the promotion of a faddish theory of entirely unscientific inquiry.
“Upon reading a review of the North Carolina K-12 Science Standards, I was concerned that nowhere was the Scientific Method even mentioned,” says Droz, who retired at 34 as a successful investor and launched a 40-year career as a “citizen advocate” of wide-ranging pursuits.
Having a particular concern about the current state of critical thinking, Droz ultimately filed a written complaint with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
“They subsequently said that they had received some 14,000 inputs on the Science Standards, and apparently, I was the only one bringing up the issue,” said Droz, whose varied interests include climate science and election integrity.
The controversy had its beginnings in 2012 when a newly formulated Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) began nudging out the Scientific Method from much of public education. Politically inspired by progressive ideology and backed by the National Research Council, National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the NGSS gained favor with the education bureaucracy of 45 states. The Scientific Method was replaced by something called “Science and Engineering Practices.”
Much of the public might not appreciate the implications of the Scientific Method’s fading from public education’s officialdom, but the loss is no less than a disaster to scientists and adherents of the traditional tenets of critical thinking.
The Scientific Method requires that questions be asked, observations made, and hypotheses formulated, tested, and proven or rejected. Conclusions are always subject to challenges with new evidence and insights.
The NGSS scraps this centuries-old process for computer models whose products are proof of nothing unless they are verified against real-world data and survive the challenges of new information. However, those criticizing the findings of this corruption of objective inquiry are often dismissed as “science deniers.”
Nowhere have the dangers of this travesty been more manifest than in climate science where a paganistic fervor has supplanted rigorous investigation and open debate. Challengers of the status quo are more likely to be met with ad hominem than data. Ideologically driven activists use flawed computer models to justify political actions like banning gas-powered cars, shutting down pipelines and spending trillions on “green” energy subsidies that provide no benefit to society.
In classrooms, students are encouraged by the NGSS to conform to politically correct views: Solar and wind energy are good. Fossil fuels are bad. Catastrophic global warming is the future. Carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for life itself, is pollution. Computer models that fail to predict weather days or months in the future can divine the behavior of the climate, Earth’s most complex system, in the next century. Questioning the most absurd of hypotheses is heresy.
Fortunately for North Carolina students, two members of the 18-person State Board of Education embraced Droz’s view that the Scientific Method should be restored to the state’s Science Standards, which it was in July. Droz said the support of the board members was instrumental in correcting the deficiency in state standards.
“I’m optimistic that the Department of Public Instruction will soon address my second major concern that the state Science Standards need more specificity regarding critical thinking,” says Droz. “It should be clear that there is an intimate connection between critical thinking analysis and the universal problem-solving procedure of the Scientific Method.”
John Droz’s example of standing for scientific integrity is an inspiration to the CO2 Coalition, of which he is a member. Determined to reverse the education establishment’s degradation of science teaching, the CO2 Coalition has created educational materials for students and educators.
The CO2 Learning Center’s books, videos and lesson plans are free for the asking. The cost of failing to repel the modern attack on rational thought is incalculable.
Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist; executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va.; and author of “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know.” His latest book A Very Convenient Warming – How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity will be available soon.
Science is a process, not a body of knowledge. English Lit or Ethnic Studies majors tend to ignore that.
Voting on theory is much more straightforward.
And willingness to change historical records to conform to the model is another element of climate prognostication.
e=mc2…
Show of hands please.
The previous show of hands was the Luminiferous aether which was used to explain why Maxwell’s equations contained the speed-of-light. So, what is your point exactly?
This article is not very comprehensive regarding the two views it describes, nor the differences in the two cosmological theories it uses as examples, but that, I believe, makes it easier to grasp the essential idea of the major philosophical differences about science, and how those differences relate to the approach John Droz is opposing. The view called “scientific realism” is apparently a majority view, commented in the article as “Inference has seemingly been reduced, here, to the uncritical acceptance of whatever the majority of scientists believe.” One might think that applies mainly to politicians and the demented glue themselves to something activists, but apparently not.
https://iai.tv/articles/cosmologys-crisis-challenges-scientific-realism-david-merritt-auid-2651?_auid=2020
English Lit is a subject. Science is a discipline. And (it comes as a surprise to some) English instruction is also a discipline – the forgotten discipline I would call it.
High School seniors who take British Lit in the U.S. need to have garnered a substantial body of knowledge from other works of lit in order to understand Chaucer and Shakespeare. Writing and reading skill development are, in fact, “processes” too. Seniors who skip steps in that process will struggle to write a research paper (a typical right-of-passage for Brit Lit.) Public schools still have a “Scope and Sequence” of English skills by grade level, citing the specific knowledge students should acquire to stay with their age group. How many do we actually hold back? Nothing to see there; move along. Dropouts, on the other hand, with their impact on dollars, are very interesting to administrations. And so we get better and better at retention, with the number of ninth grade drop-outs declining in ten of the last five years.
In fact around half of 8th graders will graduate from high school.
With regard to the objective reference points – the “objectives” and scope and sequence – they’ve been lost. Maybe English teachers have an excuse for that. They’ve been subject to decades of bashing by people who will not countenance the teaching of the culturally freighted English language, or the literature of Western Europe’s White, Anglo Saxon, (mostly) heterosexual, (largely) male dominated culture – in their midst. Maybe to survive, English teachers got “creative” with the ever-expanding lists of culturally-neutral and historically revisionist reading materials. And, yes, it’s become a bastion of liberalism. For whatever reason inner city schools have simply scrapped the scope and sequence tables and deniers of the process of learning to read and write.
Ninth grade NAEP: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/
Thirteen year-olds’ reading scores have dropped four points since 2000. Their math scores have dropped nine points.
A mere correlation, maybe, but under George Bush’s Secretaries of Ed., Paige and Spellings, kids overall scores on the NAEP were improving in Reading and Math. Under Obama (Arne Duncan) they began a decline that continues to the present.
Should say, “… and become deniers of the process of learning to read and write.”
English Lit is a subject. Science is a discipline.
***
dis·ci·pline
/ˈdisəplən/
noun
1. the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.
“a lack of proper parental and school discipline”
Similar: control, regulation, direction, order, authority, rule, strictness, a firm hand, routine, regimen, training, teaching, instruction, drill, drilling, exercise, use of punishment
2. a branch of knowledge, typically one studied in higher education.
“sociology is a fairly new discipline”
Similar: field (of study), branch of knowledge, course of study, subject, area
Clearly, science is not a discipline, by either of these meanings.
Physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are branches = disciplines of science.
Science itself is process. Science is an abbreviation of Scientific Method, a method of refining models and theories based on observations.
I’m most familiar with the term “disciplines” as broad categories of knowledge which amount to distinct ways of knowing the world and communicating with others about it: Science, Mathematics, Humanities, Arts are disciplines. While each of these has “branches” of knowledges which are subsets of study within it. Within the discipline of science, you might find narrower categories of study such as biology, chemistry, computer science, geology, physics and medicine.
I agree with the O.P. concern about secondary curricula which no longer consider the “scientific method” as paramount.
Now put it to test with CC.
CC fails every test, it’s a complete non-starter. This is why they’ve had to change the rules to make it fit.
Story tip – BBC – Melting ice reveals hidden Viking artefacts – BBC News – YouTube
There doesn’t appear to be any comments to the effect that temperatures were as warm or warmer then than they are now in our era of catastrophic climate change.
Damn, the new scientific method is not as simple as I had imagined.
Besides, payoffs, building consensus (which can also be done with payoffs), suppression of conflicting evidence and punishment of dissent needs to be included.
I really don’t think you’re looking at this in the right way at all! Where is your business sense? This is the extremely common ‘carrot and stick’ business model on a grand scale. Payoffs and bribes to the right people are the carrot, the cancelling and punishment beatings are the stick, capisce?
I just wonder if some traditional alarmists are now starting to see the light and are thus backing off the claims.
I like the narrative pushing that the ice is disappearing due to climate change and the ice pack has been there for 7000 years, but ignores the evidence of his own eyes, when he is finding 1000 year old Viking relics all over the place. Guess pointing out the contradiction didn’t occur to the do documentary maker. Oh its the BBC.
For a similar case, see this recent archaeology story in the Guardian.
Ancient rock carvings revealed by receding Amazon waters amid drought | Archaeology | The Guardian
The change is unprecedented!
Except for the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period, of course.
This also refutes the argument that the MWP was just a European event.
Quite bizarre that they are finding many objects from 1000 years ago, but think the ice is 7000 years old.
What sort of totally illogical and anti-science thought process is that !!
It reeks of utter brain-washed miasma.
So, if these explorers find arrows, spears, or horse bridles over 1,000 years old in areas where the ice recently melted, doesn’t this mean the climate was warmer there when these artefacts were made? Why would Vikings bother carrying arrows and spears up into the mountains if they were covered in ice year-round, with no animals to hunt? If this was a “Viking highway” at 1,650 meters (5,400 ft) elevation, doesn’t this imply that there was a warm season in the past when crossing the mountains would be easier than sailing around Scandinavia on the sea? After all, the Vikings were excellent shipbuilders, and they weren’t stupid!
Basically, these discoveries are further proof a Medieval Warm Period, meaning there was a later cooling period when the glaciers formed, followed by recent warming.
The explorers were right about one thing. They should hurry up and explore these areas, before the next cooling period and glacial advance covers up the artefacts.
The fact that only one out of 14,000 inputs mentioned the Scientific Method in the review of State Science Standards for K-12 is proof that public education and its administration is a failure.
And only 2 of the 18 board members…not sure how that worked because it passed…
Why would someone who knows the scienticif method go into k-12 education and its administration?
I’d considered switching from engineering to education as a math or science teacher but I learned I’d need to take at least a 50% pay cut in usa.
I thought it was Robert Boyle who first proposed a scientific method?
Got to go back to ancient Greece for the idea. It probably wasn’t original then either. 8 Billion humans alive today running around having bright ideas is a lot of bright ideas.
No. The Ancient Greeks never defined the modern scientific method. Even that great philosopher, Aristotle, appeared to be woefully ignorant of the ‘true scientific method’.
“The great philosopher Aristotle believed that men have more teeth than women. Even though he was married, he must never have counted, because men and women both develop 20 primary or baby teeth.”
History suggests that a 10th century (AD) Muslim was the first to define and apply the ‘scientific method’. Isn’t that surprising! His name was Ibn al-Haytham, sometimes known as Alhazen. He was born 965 AD to a family of Arab or Persian origin in Basra, Iraq, which was at the time part of the Buyid emirate.
Here’s his description of his method of scientific enquiry, from Wikipedia.
“Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and … attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. — Alhazen.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham
Musk offered Wikipedia a billion dollars if they would change their name to Dickipedia.
Unsurprising; a lot of what we know actually comes from Persian scholars. Greek scholars studied in Persia, visited some of the great libraries there and, subsequently, made astounding discoveries in the Greek world. Then Alexander destroyed the great Persian libraries, and we lost a treasure trove of knowledge. Recent discoveries of tablets from Babylon have revealed knowledge of ‘Greek mathematics’ that predate their supposed Greek origins. Shrug it off and be thankful no-one is seriously considering burning all the libraries (yet).
There was a stone tablet discovered in Mesopotamia which showed a list of numbers in the ancient Babylonian (base 60) numeration system. When it was deciphered, it was discovered that it contained ratios of the long leg to the short leg, and the hypotenuse to the short leg, of right triangles, which correspond nearly exactly to the Pythagorean theorem. It was essentially a table of tangents and cosecants.
The first line contains the numbers 1 + 20/60 and 1 + 40/60, which would be the ratios for a 3-4-5 right triangle.
This stone tablet was likely carved over 2,000 years before Pythagoras was born. How many modern trigonometry students could calculate right-triangle ratios in base 60?
Not only that, it appeared to be a simpler way of working it out as well, because of the base 60 mathematics. It should also be mentioned that we still tell the time based on the same base 60 mathematics – 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 2 12-hour periods per day are all from ancient Sumerian/Babylonian mathematics.
My how things have changed. In the Graduate School Sciences (OK, in 1971) a famous Geology Professor taught The Philosophy of Science, which was the Scientific Method. This class was the event designed to identify those students not adaptable for a Science curriculum. It went something like this: the Professor enters the class with a stack of mid-term test results. He praises the highest scoring as he hands them their tests results, he says Good, for the next batch of handout results, he says please study more and try harder to the next batch of recipients, then he begins suggesting other areas of study for some, and finishes handing out the last batch saying “wasting time in a University has ruined many a good future truck driver”. Impossible to think of such comments now.
If we follow the “elites’ ” advice and replace diesel trucks by electric trucks, their drivers will waste plenty of time waiting for them to be recharged.
Nowhere have the dangers of this travesty been more manifest than in climate science where a paganistic fervor has supplanted rigorous investigation and open debate.
In a much shorter time, all about COV-19, it’s origin, “vaccines”, early treatment etc. was scientificly on a very bad way too and the consequeces aren’t foreseeable.
I forgot, a payoff of some kind has to be associated with the vote.
No consequences. Why would “they” not do it again?
This prompted me to go the NY science standards and put in key search words. Yikes! “Models” – “science community validates each theory” Hypothesis? No. Scientific Method? No.
I see why John Droz got involved in NC. Wow..
Excellent work. The NGSS needs to be removed everywhere. I had no idea what was going on. I can’t think of anything more important than critical thinking and sticking to a proven path of study, The Scientific Method.
“Most people think that science is reliable by virtue of its method – the ‘scientific method’. But that idea is wrong. In reality there is no singular scientific method. There are many scientific methods. What makes scientific claims reliable is the process by which they are vetted. All scientific claims are subject to tough scrutiny, and it is only the claims that pass this scrutiny that we can say constitute scientific knowledge.” Naomi Oreskes, 2019.
Now you can see who is behind this and why this is such a dangerous idea – she wants scientific ideas to be vetted by picked gatekeepers, keeping only the ideas that fit the narrative as ‘scientific knowledge’.
It’s doubtful that Thomas Kuhn would agree with you. Kuhn would have said, in fact did say, that science takes place in scientific communities adhering to a certain paradigm whose ideas may differ from others and change over time. She doesn’t mention picked gatekeepers or a narrative. You would do better to concentrate on some of the truly nutty things she comes up with.
I think the implication is there and I have no wish to buy her book where she extols this approach at great length. I would include this as one of her truly nutty things.
Naomi Oreskes is wrong about the scientific method just as she is about so much else.
There is only one scientific method: theory and result.
Theory begins as an explanatory hypothesis. The hypothesis is so explicit as to deductively predict a unique observable (a result). Absence of the observable falsifies the hypothesis.
A hypothesis graduates to theory status if it survives several such mortal tests.
That is science, All of it.
The earliest known idea of testing ideas against the verdict of physical reality is found with Thales of Miletus in the 6th century BCE.
It seems very possible that the idea of an objective standard emerged much earlier, with the invention and use of the balance in early trade. I’d expect every early trader to have carried a set of matched weight stones to test and validate the balance used in trade,
Honest weight of produce for an honest payment in metal (or whatever) was the gift of the balance. Argument was unnecessary. No cause for fighting. Cheats were exposed, making a virtue of knowable honesty.
I believe all of science emerged from that start. The first balance proved the existence of objective knowledge.
“. . .the scientist may appear as a mere truth-finding machine steered by intuitive sensitivity.
. But this view takes no account of the curious fact that he is himself the ultimate judge of what he accepts as true. His brain labours to satisfy its own demands according to criteria applied by its own discretion to apply the rules to each run as he thinks fit. Or, to vary the simile, the scientist appears acting here as detective, policeman, judge, and jury all rolled into one. He apprehends certain clues as suspect; formulates the charge and examines the evidence vboth for and against it, admitting or rejecting such parts of it as he thinks fit, and finally pronounces judgement. While all the time, far from being neutral at heart, he is himself passionately interested in the outcome of the procedure. He must be, for otherewise he will never discover a problem at all and certainly not advance towards its solution.”
Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, University of Chicago Press, 1966, pg. 38
The view any scientist may take is subject to the critical inquiries of other scientists. The scientific method itself provides the criteria for judgment.
There are plenty of examples of certain scientists pronouncing judgment and later being found wrong. Blondlot’s N-Ray (pdf) is a prominent example.
Right or wrong, correct or incorrect is not a subjective decision. It is not founded in passion. The judge is the result.
In short, Polanyi is wrong. He greatly overstated the case.
But not as judge. The scientist does indeed act as detective, policeman and barrister building from the clues, formulating a case and presenting it as fact. However, as Einstein pointed out, all it would take is one person with contradictory evidence to dismiss the case in its entirety. Oreskes is putting together an idea for unassailable facts, once they have been approved by gatekeepers, the Scientific method allows those ideas to be challenged by anyone who has contradictory evidence. The key point is that the Scientific method relies on evidence, for or against, to determine the factual basis of hypotheses, Oreskes would rely on opinion.
In that central bubble, they left out “Adjust data so that the model fits”.
Mr. Hall. The graphic above illustrates bona fide science, i.e., the genuine scientific method.
I think he may be being sarcastic.
Quite so. I was tempted to quote Bill Murray with one of my favorite lines: “Back off man, I’m a scientist”. However, these days, it’s Emeritus.
Okay. The sarcasm was nonsensical, however, for this wasn’t an attempt to describe the scammers’ bogus “methodology.”
Apparently, around 7 others thought his sarcasm was witty and on-point, so, I will just sigh, shake my head, and walk away.
Hi, Janice.
Back in my earlier days here, unloaded on someone’s comment.
He was being sarcastic. I wasn’t familiar with his “name” or where he was “coming from”. There was no “/sarc” tag” or anything else to indicate otherwise. I thought the comment was “real”.
Someone familiar with both our screen names (and what we’ve said in comments) told me he was being sarcastic.
Thank you, Mr. Din, for your very kindly coming alongside to console me. While I don’t feel the need (heh — I really am that certain of my opinion, here 😏) for reassurance, that you cared enough to do that is VERY LOVELY.
The graphic is missing explicit mentioning of laws. The formulation of laws lies between data gathering and making predictions. When analyzing data, sometimes a law can be formulated to explain how the data relate. Then one or more laws may suggest a hypothesis to explain the relationships. Unfortunately, many think laws are proven theories, which is nonsense.
Mr. Masterson. I was not trying to defend the graphic as being COMPLETE. I was only trying to point out that Mr. Hall’s criticism (or nonsensical (to MY mind)) was off point.
Yes, indeed, it is a mistake to equate a “law” with a “proven theory.”
ARRRGH. EDIT: “… nonsensical sarcasm …”
Thanks for the correction. As a commenter that often likes to use sarcasm, I will try to make mine more obvious in the future.
So when you said, “the genuine scientific method,” you didn’t mean “the complete scientific method?” I’m a little fuzzy on the nuance.
And he hasn’t been cancelled?
The Polscum have only relatively recently worked out that scientists produce the results required as long as the money’s right. It hasn’t taken them long to head off any inconvenient nextgen rebel upstarts questioning the orthodoxy of this approach.
“. . . said Droz, whose varied interests include climate science and election integrity.”
I’m surprised he isn’t in jail. There’s two things you aren’t supposed to question (unless you’re a Democrat who may question election integrity).
Its when you get (in NGSS) to
Core Idea ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
ESS3.A: Natural Resources
ESS3.B: Natural Hazards
ESS3.C: Human Impacts on Earth Systems
ESS3.D: Global Climate Change
that it gets a bit uneasy. You can imagine that a curriculum which sounds great in principle is only as good as its application in practice, and the various core ideas appear to envisage teaching theories as fact. Which is fine on some things, I don’t suppose anyone would object to teaching bacterial and viral theories of disease as facts, or the current state of knowledge of the immune system. Or basic physics.
Its not so fine if activists start to want to teach CAGW, Critical Race Theory or current gender ideology as these ‘core ideas’ which are taught largely as facts.
I suspect the solution might be to confine teaching about method to the classes where you are teaching the subjects. Any reasonable curriculum will involve explanation of where current theories come from, what preceded them, and why the eariler accounts were abandoned. Combustion and phlogiston for instance.
Then teach philosophy of science as a separate thing in itself. It is after all quite a contested area with a lot of different accounts of the sociology of scientific inquiry confusingly mixed with arguments about the logic of how it should work. I’m not at all sure that many will benefit from these rather rarified debates, but perhaps there are some key ideas that are useful. I’m thinking for instance about falsifiability. Also about the argument that almost all of what we think of as observation statements are in fact theory laden, and the implications of this for falsifiability.
I suspect the best way to get to understanding proper scientific method is by doing it over and over again, and the best lab is the history of discredited ideas.
In fact, lots of people would (or ought to) object to teaching virology as science. It isn’t—as the last 3yrs has amply demonstrated. Otherwise, spot on, Michel.
Topical interview.
Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock (presents the BBC program The Sky At Night) speaking in The Observer.
“When I grew up, there were many kids who looked at science and thought: ‘Well, someone like me doesn’t do that because it’s not my culture, it’s not for me – I don’t have a history of this.’
“Diversity is about bringing different ideas and people into science because if it’s all just done by the European white guys, we get a very blinkered view of the world.
“That’s why access to the history of astronomy is important for everyone.”
Dr Aderin-Pocock has written a guide to astronomy, The Art of Stargazing, which highlights contributions to the field from ancient figures who were not “white men in togas”.
Also
“There’s actually a whole area of study called archaeoastronomy. All these cultures have been looking at the stars and trying to understand them for thousands of years – and that mustn’t be forgotten.”
But why is outdated ancient science from long-dead civilisations still important?
“When I grew up, there were many kids who looked at science and thought: ‘Well, someone like me doesn’t do that because it’s not my culture, it’s not for me – I don’t have a history of this.’ Diversity is about bringing different ideas and people into science because if it’s all just done by the European white guys, we get a very blinkered view of the world. That’s why access to the history of astronomy is important for everyone.”
The usual fatal idiocy that the color of your skin in some undefined way determines the ideas you have. And also the usual fatal idiocy that pre-scientific cultures and their theories have some alternative and equally valid knowledge. That we can find something different about the stars and planets by listening to theories that people with brown, black or yellow skins came up with. Not because they had better telescopes, better math, more careful observations and so got it right, or more right.
No, because the color of their skins gave their ideas greater diversity, and that’s good, right? A smart woman lost in the maze of post modernism, unable to come out and say that reality is subjective, almost certainly knows it isn’t, but has a mild infection of the cultural illness and isn’t able to avoid paying a sort of vague lip service to it.
If it ain’t falsifiable it ain’t science, but nonsense. Falsifiability is the demarcation boundary of science from non-science.
Scientist is an epithet, not a title.
Its more complicated than that. You almost always, maybe always have a choice when an observation appears to falsify a theory.
Take the Ptolemaic theory. We start with the view that the orbits of the planets are circular. Then we make observations which are inconsistent with that. So we have a choice, abandon the circular hypothesis or adapt the theory to include epicycles and equants.
It was not at all clear which to choose, and the underlying reason for this is that mathematically an eliptical orbit can be reproduced by enough epicycles. So the resulting predictions were accurate.
Observation statements are often, maybe always, theory laden. Falsification is important as a concept. But you need more to account for how science does and should work.
Occam’s Razor comes to mind here.
Aristarchus was the first to suggest the Heliocentric model in the 3rd century BCE. But it was rejected as atheistic. Science not yet divorced from religion, apparently.
Had it seriously been pursued, Kepler’s laws would likely have been found some 1500 years earlier.
“Had it seriously been pursued, Kepler’s laws would likely have been found some 1500 years earlier.”
Maybe. Kepler had Tycho Brahe’s accurate observations. Someone would have had to make similar observations. I’m not aware of any previously accurate set of observations. Actually, Kepler’s Third Law is only approximate. The Sun’s large mass hides that fact that the law really should depend on the sum of the two masses–the Sun’s and the planet in question.
You’re right, the Greeks didn’t have Tycho’s observations.
But they had to impose epicycles to rationalize the orbits they were able to observe by eye. A heliocentric model at least would have allowed circular orbits.
Eventually, as predictive errors crept in, it seems possible that some later brilliant mathematician such as Archimedes might have tried to remove the errors using alternative orbital paths. I agree rejecting perfect circles might have been conceptually difficult.
I changed my initial comment from “unlikely” to “maybe.” You could be right–the Heliocentric model may have inspired the ancient Greeks to do what Tycho and Kepler did. After all, both Tycho and the ancient Greeks had the same visual instrument: the Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball.
However, Tycho also had instrumentation that the ancient Greeks might not have had access to. Would the devices for measuring angles have been available to the ancients? Tycho also had better time pieces.
I don’t know what calendar the ancient Greeks had, but the old Roman calendar was a horror show until Julius Caesar fixed it. Tycho passed away before the Gregorian Calendar was established, so the drift in the Julian Calendar didn’t seem to hinder Kepler.
Are you familiar with the Antikythera astronomical computer? it dates to the first century BCE, and is extraordinarily advanced.
We’ve really no idea what Greco-Roman thinkers might have achieved, had they not been brought down.
A short BBC video about the Antikythera computer.
“The technology gets lost and forgotten.”
Like when the Muslims destroyed the library of Alexandria.
The device exists. I can’t deny that.
“We’ve really no idea what Greco-Roman thinkers might have achieved, had they not been brought down.”
As an engineer, I was taught that in modern times, engineers and scientists work hand-in-hand. Back in Roman times, scientists were part of the aristocracy, and engineers were part of the lowly working class. The two classes hated each other and rarely communicated. There were technologies known to Roman scientists that were centuries ahead of their time. However, it was the engineers that would create those technologies, and the scientists wouldn’t discuss it with the engineers.
We were taught that in modern times, such bigotry isn’t prevalent. Yeah, right. I’ve had so-called scientists state that I was “just an engineer.” It was as if they loathe even shaking my hand. I’ve had more advanced math than most of these silly scientists, and maybe as much, if not more, physics.
Culture determines the attitudes of the majority, not much doubt about that. Even of the otherwise intelligent.
But lots of spade-work was necessary before a link between science and engineering could be forged. We can’t fault ancient peoples for not knowing things most now take for granted.
Engineering these days is more like applied physics, Back then, the physics wasn’t available.
“Like when the Muslims destroyed the library of Alexandria.”
Actually they didn’t, it was allowed to decay during Roman times and membership faded away by the 260s AD. The remains of the library probably were destroyed during the invasion by the army of the Queen of Palmyra in 270AD, long before any Muslims existed.
Thanks for reading my comment and thanks for correcting my history. I’m shocked–SHOCKED–to learn some of my history knowledge is wrong.
Thanks for the links, by the way.
On Science Standards, they would make up their own rules for what is science and what is not science science. Latter should be Not Science is not science. There is no arbiter of what is and what is not. If you wing it, it should get flagged and pulled. Non scientists would make their own rules. Yes, let’s just stop the $%#& b.s.
There’s a reason why the circle labeled “Refine, Alter, Expand, or Reject Hypotheses” is at the center of the scientific method. A theory only has value when it is successfully tested against the real world.
Many climate “scientists” are afraid of this step, since being proven wrong dries up the cash flow.
Critical thinking.
Here’s something I said some time ago.
“I was a teacher’s aide in the mid 70’s in an inner-city public school. This was a lesson in a 7th and 8th grade remedial reading workbook, the best I remember it:
“There are two things I like about my little brother Billy and two things I don’t like.
The two things I like are that he’s easy to please and he’s fun to play with.
The two things I don’t like are that he screams and cries a lot and he breaks everything I let him play with. Just yesterday he broke my favorite model airplane.
Questions:
What are the two things he likes?
What are the two things he doesn’t like?”
That lesson stuck with me. The scrabbling of the eggs was going on long before common core.”
The two things he likes and the two things he doesn’t like contradict each other.
This lesson teaches and reinforces “critical feeling” rather than critical thinking.
But is it falsifiable?
John Droz deserves a Nobel Prize, and nothing less.
Go to YouTube and watch any lecture by Naomi Oreskes. She is an enemy, if not THE enemy, of the scientific method, by which I mean science.
Her PhD is in history of science. I find that fact to be funny.