Science Unites

One of the great advantages of the naturalist worldview is that it serves as a basis for bringing people together under a common set of ground rules. Knowledge in science is public, not private, because it must be submitted to others for verification or falsification. A naturalist believes that the empirical truth is waiting to be discovered, and that we can all agree on the empirical truth so long as we believe in a few important criteria. Science can exist in any culture and any nation. It ...

 What It Means to be a Scientist

In reality, scientists are just people like you and me. Most of us don't wear lab coats (I don't) or work with bubbling beakers or sparking van de Graf generators (unless they are chemists or physicists who actually work with that equipment). Most scientists are not geniuses either. It is true that, on average, scientists tend to be better educated than the typical person on the street, but that education is a necessity to learn all the information that allows a scientist to make discoveries....

 The Conflict of Free Versus Social

The problem of values arises only when men try to fit together their need to be social animals with their need to be free men. There is no problem, and there are no values, until men want to do both. If an anarchist wants only freedom, whatever the cost, he will prefer the jungle of man at war with man. And if a tyrant wants only social order, he will create the totalitarian state.

 Karl Popper's Conclusions About Good Theories

It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.     Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.     Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the ...