17 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Engineering Requires Science
Engineering is quite different from science. Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature. Engineers stress invention. To embody an invention the engineer must put his idea in concrete terms, and design something that people can use. That something can be a device, a gadget, a material, a method, a computing program, an innovative experiment, a new solution to a problem, or an improvement on what is existing. Since a design has to be concrete, ...Folksonomies: science engineering
Folksonomies: science engineering
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notesScience passively observes, but Engineering must discover what it needs in order to make progress.
28 APR 2012 by ideonexus
There is No Lying in Science
However, all scientific statements and laws have one characteristic in common: they are “true or false” (adequate or inadequate). Roughly speaking, our reaction to them is “yes” or “no.” The scientific way of thinking has a further characteristic. The concepts which it uses to build up its coherent systems are not expressing emotions. For the scientist, there is only “being,” but no wishing, no valuing, no good, no evil; no goal. As long as we remain within the realm of science proper, we can... 1 notes
notesScience is about right and wrong, the search for truth.
19 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Evolving Methods of Science
A closer look at the course followed by developing theory reveals for a start that it is by no means as continuous as one might expect, but full of breaks and at least apparently not along the shortest logical path. Certain methods often afforded the most handsome results only the other day, and many might well have thought that the development of science to infinity would consist in no more than their constant application. Instead, on the contrary, they suddenly reveal themselves as exhauste... 1 notes
notesScience does not progress smoothly through the constant application of a single method, but the methods change and there is conflict between generations.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Dr. Victor Frankenstein Inspired by Science
‘The ancient teachers of this science,’ said he, ‘promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of Nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; t... 1 notes
notesScience promises the secrets of the Universe, Shelley makes it sound like a dark art.
17 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
An 11th Century View of Science
The chief aids to philosophical inquiry and the practice of virtue are reading, learning, meditation, and assiduous application. Reading scrutinizes the written subject matter immediately before it. Learning likewise generally studies what is written, but also sometimes moves on to what is preserved in the archives of the memory and is not in the writing, or to those things that become evident when one understands the given subject. Meditation, however, reaches out farther to what is unknown,... 1 notes
notesScience is a prerequisite to virtue, requiring study, application, and meditation dependent on grammar.
19 APR 2011 by ideonexus
The Mesh of Science
I do not think that truth becomes more primitive if we pursue it to simpler facts. For no fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field—a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it.
Truth in science is like Everest, an ordering of the facts. We organize our experience in patterns which, formalized. make the network of scientific laws. But scienc... 1 notes
notesScience "articulates the movements of the world."
