Tok Natural Science and Pursuit of Knowledge
Harry Ma
2013/03/19
Mr.Hodachok
“To what extent does disagreement aid the pursuit of knowledge in the natural science?” The problem with natural science with the truth discovered is that an over confident belief on an aspect of knowledge or science, may lead to blindness in other aspects of the same field. Going back to the very start to the discovery of laws and theories in natural science, when unknown factors are first discovered by observation, scientists and experimentalists question the very existence of the unknown factors. People tend to explain and define the behaviors by numerous of hypothesis, and finally conduct experiments to prove them. Scientific laws and theories are then discovered and set in place by seemingly successful trials of experiments. This is, or at least been believed as, the general trend of the discovery and explanation of natural science that takes place.
But when powerful scientific laws are been followed and understood for a long period of time, other elements or methodology that contradicts with the laws will be difficult not to be rejected even before it’s proven to be valid. When Mikolaj Kopernik first suggested that Earth rotates around the Sun, he offered a whole new perspective of the universe. However, scientists of the same generation did not accept his point of view because they believed it was the other way around. The fact is, the truth, or so-called knowledge that was solely trustworthy in Kopernik’s period of time is actually a falsely believed lie. The law that was believed back then had support from the credibility of the society. In fact, the solid law was so “concrete” and hard to refute, barely any scientist even tried to cross the barrier (the law) and push it over. From Kopernik’s incident, we could say that the knowledge provided by natural science cannot easily be independent of its power as a social authority. And using Thomas Kuhn’s language to explain, the paradigm is hard to shift, the pursuit of
2013/03/19
Mr.Hodachok
“To what extent does disagreement aid the pursuit of knowledge in the natural science?” The problem with natural science with the truth discovered is that an over confident belief on an aspect of knowledge or science, may lead to blindness in other aspects of the same field. Going back to the very start to the discovery of laws and theories in natural science, when unknown factors are first discovered by observation, scientists and experimentalists question the very existence of the unknown factors. People tend to explain and define the behaviors by numerous of hypothesis, and finally conduct experiments to prove them. Scientific laws and theories are then discovered and set in place by seemingly successful trials of experiments. This is, or at least been believed as, the general trend of the discovery and explanation of natural science that takes place.
But when powerful scientific laws are been followed and understood for a long period of time, other elements or methodology that contradicts with the laws will be difficult not to be rejected even before it’s proven to be valid. When Mikolaj Kopernik first suggested that Earth rotates around the Sun, he offered a whole new perspective of the universe. However, scientists of the same generation did not accept his point of view because they believed it was the other way around. The fact is, the truth, or so-called knowledge that was solely trustworthy in Kopernik’s period of time is actually a falsely believed lie. The law that was believed back then had support from the credibility of the society. In fact, the solid law was so “concrete” and hard to refute, barely any scientist even tried to cross the barrier (the law) and push it over. From Kopernik’s incident, we could say that the knowledge provided by natural science cannot easily be independent of its power as a social authority. And using Thomas Kuhn’s language to explain, the paradigm is hard to shift, the pursuit of