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To do real science you need a hypothesis, a control and an experiment. Finding correlations in historical datasets after the fact is not really science. It's

To do real science you need a hypothesis, a control and an experiment. Finding correlations in historical datasets after the fact is not really science. It's good for formulating hypothesis but it's not science, at least as described by Francis Bacon or Karl Popper. Good science provides falsifiable predictions, more dubious things that are called "science" merely provide scientific sounding explanations for natural phenomenon.

dantheman 16y ago
Science is not as well demarcated as you may think -- here's a good overview: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/
nagrom 16y ago
Under your definition, astronomy is not a real science since astronomical experiments are pretty much impossible and the term 'control' has no meaning there. It is perfectly acceptable in science to use observations of natural phenomena that can be used to build explanatory frameworks that have some predictive power. You can then formulate, ex ante, an event that either works towards confirming your explanation, or disproving it. By observing the outcome of that event (or even finding that event in a historical data set! Although you must be certain that it did not enter your hypothesis), you can gain useful scientific data. Hypotheses-based predictions need not come from controlled experiments. If that were the case, the scientific method would be much less generally applicable. I appreciate that the term 'scientific' is thrown around with gay abandon, but if you intend to educate people on the true meaning of the term you should not exclude what is arguably the oldest of the pure sciences.
- narrator 16y ago
  If we constructed the laws of physics merely by observing the planets we could have concluded that a mass rotated around an axis will move in epicycles, which is how the pre-Copernican astronomers explained the movements of Mars. Astronomy is merely the application of experimentally determined physics here on earth to the movement of celestial bodies.
  - nagrom 16y ago
    You're missing an awful lot of astronomy if you think that orbital mechanics is the sum total of astronomical knowledge. There's no earth-bound laboratory that can create the hundreds of Teslas magnetic fields found in the sun; there's no earthbound laboratory where one can see high-mass effects like gravitational lensing; there's no earth bound laboratory that can explain or even observe the existence/absence of dark matter. Astronomy is much, much more than dynamics.

dantheman 16y ago

Science is not as well demarcated as you may think -- here's a good overview: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/

nagrom 16y ago

Under your definition, astronomy is not a real science since astronomical experiments are pretty much impossible and the term 'control' has no meaning there. It is perfectly acceptable in science to use observations of natural phenomena that can be used to build explanatory frameworks that have some predictive power. You can then formulate, ex ante, an event that either works towards confirming your explanation, or disproving it. By observing the outcome of that event (or even finding that event in a historical data set! Although you must be certain that it did not enter your hypothesis), you can gain useful scientific data. Hypotheses-based predictions need not come from controlled experiments. If that were the case, the scientific method would be much less generally applicable. I appreciate that the term 'scientific' is thrown around with gay abandon, but if you intend to educate people on the true meaning of the term you should not exclude what is arguably the oldest of the pure sciences.

narrator 16y ago
If we constructed the laws of physics merely by observing the planets we could have concluded that a mass rotated around an axis will move in epicycles, which is how the pre-Copernican astronomers explained the movements of Mars. Astronomy is merely the application of experimentally determined physics here on earth to the movement of celestial bodies.
- nagrom 16y ago
  You're missing an awful lot of astronomy if you think that orbital mechanics is the sum total of astronomical knowledge. There's no earth-bound laboratory that can create the hundreds of Teslas magnetic fields found in the sun; there's no earthbound laboratory where one can see high-mass effects like gravitational lensing; there's no earth bound laboratory that can explain or even observe the existence/absence of dark matter. Astronomy is much, much more than dynamics.