- #71
Kajahtava
- 106
- 1
Aequating if some thing is a science to how useful it is, or how 'intellectually challenging' it is nonsensical. I daresay that chess is intellectually challenging, or that whiping your bum is useful, neither are sciences.arildno said:A silly statement of Rutherford's indicative of the all-too common physicist's flaw of wholly unjustified arrogance.
The inability of physics to come up with any useful predictions within fields like biology or the social sciences (due to the mathematically unmanageable wealth of parameters involved) is a case in point.
And who cares, really, whether a star light-years away from us has a lot higher density than our own sun (and that we may predict&compute it)?
The activity to develop conceptual tools effective in the study of fields like biology or the social sciences is no less intellectually challenging than developing the mathematical tools usable in physics.
Ingenious experiments must be thought out to show this or that in biology, and Emile Durkheim's thoughtful analysis of the suicide phenomenon must be considered good research.
Science is the process of inferring truth via the scientific method, since physics stays the strictest to objectivity, falsifiability, lack of human interpretation and manipulation of data, surely at the least physics is the most scientific of the empirical sciences. That has nothing to do with use, and indeed, pure science, per definition is scientific research done only for knowledge without any practical use for it, at the point in time the research is done.
Physics without a single debate to it since Newton on is the most, if not the only empirical scientific discipline out there, because in physics, new theories are expected to default to the old theories under special circumstances. Relativistic mechanics approximates Newtonian mechanics under every day velocity, the standard model approximates special relativity under macroscopic scales.
Thereby, physics truly improves and becomes closer and closer to the truth and becomes more praecise, however chemistry and biology often contradict their old theories with new ones, to me, that may not happen, if a scientific method of deduction allows that, then I can no longer call it science, albeit practical, which is a completely different thing. Science is simply a methodology and if a new accepted theory outright contradicts an older one, than one of those per definition was not inferred and tested by the scientific method.