A website relevant to this page: http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/BadScience.html
Basic to the way that science proceeds is the separation between observation and explanation. Scientists observe natural phenomena and attempt to describe them accurately. Accurate observation provides the indispensable platform upon which hypothesis, theory and ultimately explanation must be based.
Learning to keep observation and explanation separate is apparently one of the most simple skills to grasp, and yet one of the most difficult to carry out in practice. It is hard, for example, when describing a hand specimen of a rock or how the partial pressure of oxygen is thought to have varied in the Earth's atmosphere over geological time, to stop with the description and not go on to try to explain it. Isn't science about explaining nature, after all?
Well, of course it is! But we can only hope to arrive at a correct understanding of a natural phenomenon if we have first accurately observed it and described its features. In science, it has been said, if a thing has not been measured then we know nothing about it.
Any student of science must learn to observe and describe first, and to offer explanations later! The sequence of steps Observation Ô Description Ô Explanation is a fundamental procedure in all branches of science.
In the short section below I try to make explicit what the application of the rule Observation Ô Description Ô Explanation means in S269, Earth and Life.
|
S269, Earth and Life is a different kind of course from S260, Geology. Much of the data presented to you has already been collected, and you are asked to use these data to argue conclusions about the history of the Earth System -- for example, you will use carbon isotope data to draw conclusions about the possible presence of life on the Earth as early as 3.8 billion years ago. So in the context of the procedure of Observation Ô Description Ô Explanation, you will often find that you are asked to take the Observation Ô Description part on trust, and go straight to Explanation. This is necessary because you cannot be asked in the context of a second level course to, say, go to Greenland and gather your own carbon isotope data from 3.8 billion year old rocks! Nevertheless, you can be sure that the procedure of Observation Ô Description Ô Explanation is used in this type of "palaeoenvironmental" science as much as in any other branch of science. You will be expected to apply the procedure as follows:
So in S269 you should use tables, diagrams, isotope curves, models and the results of running models on computers, graphs of sea-level changes, pollen diagrams, maps of ocean and atmosphere circulation and any other type of data as if they were factual. This is not to say that these data are necessarily factual because much of the data presented in the course is provisional and subject to revision as new data become available. S269 is a course that presents new frontiers in the Earth Sciences and the interpretations and data upon which they are based are changing all the time. All the more reason, therefore, to observe the procedure Observation Ô Description Ô Explanation!
|
