Natural Blogarithms

Class Date: Friday, February 16, 2007

Dr. Boyd was in charge for another day. This time he covered topics from the history of science as an illustration of how science progresses. Using specific case studies from the history of scientific endeavor, we learn some important principles that undergird how we understand science as it is today.

Below are some of the topics that we touched on in this class:

1. The UV Catastrophe: This serves as a good case study to see how scientific revolutions occur as well as a lesson about the dangers of extrapolation
2. Causality: the difficulty of assessing the cause from the effect. Wearing skirts causes an increased likelihood of breast cancer
3. Did Science arise in a Christian World? Did the Christian World help to create modern science? (see Eric Snow’s Paper)
4. Positivism vs. Realism
5. Galileo
6. Michael Faraday
7. Isaac Newton

written by SplineGuy