Meaning 
What Is Science?
By taking a robustly objective view of the relation of evidence to conclusion, experimental and empirical investigation explains what laws of nature are, and are not. It can be shown how measurement, data, statistics, and mathematical models work in science with respect to climate and past geological conditions or the rates of population growth.
reliable | disputable | existence | visualization | critics | general | specific | experimental 
Though difficult to say which parts of science are well-established and which are not, some knowledge is far less certain than experimentally verified and theoretically sensible bodies of reliable information.
Our cosmos possesses a Solar System is not a terra system:
| school | geocentric model | heliocentric model |
|---|---|---|
| proponent | ||
| proponents | Aristotle, |
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo |
Here one hopes to illustrate with an engaging episode in the history of science, how disputes are settled among advocates of dialectically opposite concepts.
Lux: light as composed of waves versus particles or corpuscularianism.
| concept | waves | corpuscularianism |
proponent |
Huygens |
Newton |
proponent |
Bohr |
Einstein |
|
 |
|
And we will end with some colorful rudeness on postmodernist solecisms concerning existence, epistemology and discovery of material evidence suggesting a remarkable unity in nature.
The essential balance of theory and reality
bios, life: as a life in the life-cycle sense --the particulars of "a person's life"-- and life as in the generic sense that there is Earth the home of life, has two meanings.
There has been in the western tradition since Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle a dichotomy in the very way we express our observations and thoughts. This dichotomy is responsible for creating a fork in the road, speaking metaphorically of the highway that is conceptualization, to understanding. Any concept (real or imagined) has immediately upon its expression a particular manifestation and a less particular correlate --or related entity-- so that items in an individualized sense are part of a wider set or class of similar things. This gave rise to a serious split and debate among Medieval philosophers over reality, from which we inherit a split personality with respect to descriptions of nature.
- What the laws of nature are,
- briefly shows how measurement, data, statistics, and mathematical models work in science,
- states which parts of science are well-established and which not,
- illustrates with engaging episodes in the history of science, and
- ends with some colorful rudeness about postmodernist solecisms concerning science
Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values
Thomas Kuhn On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions
But the point of Kuhn and his followers was not to request such a story, but to argue that it must be irrelevant to explaining scientific beliefs.
The worst effect of Kuhn, and the one taken up both most unthinkingly and most forcefully across the whole range of disciplines he influenced, has been the frivolous discarding of the way things are as a constraint on theory about the way things are constantly becoming.
Tycho Brahe's cosmic portrayal of the terra/solar system as a sort of 'compromise' between the helio & geocentric schools of astronomy
This page was created, by J. Siry.
