In High School science texts, in my day, they gave a quick tour of certain canonical facts, but also made some feeble attempt to answer the question of why science works. The answer they gave was something like "The Experimental Method". It is something like:
Set up two situations, identical except in one variable, let both undergo an identical set of processes, make a prediction about how the end results will be different, and see whether or not the prediction is right. I suspect the only domains in which this sort of methodology does most of the work, are ones like experimental psychology or sociology. In medicine, once you've produced a candidate drug, you will use just that sort of methodology, but how you got the candidate drug is quite a different matter.So is there some overall way to describe methods that produce good science? Ph.D.s in the fields of philosophy of science, and epistemology make careers out of debating this. There are a number of classic answers, and new attempts probably every year. Rather than go right to these, let's do more exploration of the history and present subject matter of various sciences, which is the main source of data for arguing about the philosophy of science.
In astrophysics, a significant bit of news might be that an object has been discovered at position such and such in the sky which is unlike objects that have been classified in the past, and here is an attempt to explain, using current theory, or some new theory, how such an object could exist.
In biological fields, a "discovery" might consist of minute observations of some insect in the Brazilian rain forest, with some kind of archival work leading to the conclusion that it a previously unobserved species. One or more samples are saved, kept alive if possible, to be produced on demand, an argument is made concerning its evolutionary family tree (what other species is it related to), and the discoverer gets to give the new species a name.
Going back to the rain forests, you might learn from an anthropologist about a plant derivative with certain effects on people like pain relief. One step might be to see if it really does anything -- this conforms nicely with the high school science textbook's "experimental method". But then comes trying to extract and isolate the effective ingredient, and use all sorts of methods that don't fall into that pattern to determine its chemical nature. Someone may then work for years finding a way to efficiently synthesize it.
If you go back to the very beginnings of modern science, what is there? I am going to suggest something new, or at least new to me -- maybe others have thought of it already, though my reading has been reasonably wide-ranging.
What I think we see in the beginnings of science is the discovery of something more or less perfectly describable, whose movements if there are any, are likewise more or less perfectly describable (or predictable). A key thing to realize is that while this sort of thing is the first thing we see in our high school science textbooks, early humankind hardly ever encountered such a thing.
Possibly the first field of such discoveries was the sky, and especially the night sky with hundreds of stars which never move relative to one another although recognizable groups of them called constellations leave the visible sky, going over the horizon nightly. The moon, when visible, passed through all these stationary points of light, seeming to be "visiting" one constellation after another. Its course was not easy to describe, but early civilizations, with the aid of some sort of mathematics, and meticulous record keeping carried out for years and eventually centuries, came closer and closer to doing this. The very consistency of the night sky fascinated humankind, but it was noticed before long that besides the moon, there were a handful of other "wandering stars", and when their paths were recorded for years and centuries, they turned out to be very hard to describe indeed. They seemed to truly wander among the stars, their paths looping back on themselves.
What we were getting a look at was something that would remain unfathomable for many hundreds of years. Its simplicity and regularity, once understood, would force a staggering reassessment of our long cherished central place in the universe, and shock the western educated elite into giddy optimism as to what more problems we might be able to solve if we set our minds to it.
Meanwhile, closer to the ground, what other perfectly describable things were there to be discovered? Let me also, while enumerating things that fit my intuitive understanding of ("more or less") perfectly describable, try to get clearer on what I mean by perfectly describable objects or phenomena.
The path of a dense compact body like a rock when thrown through the air was utterly misjudged by the ancient philosophers, yet it was there to seen.
A brief piece at http://library.thinkquest.org/2779/History.html illustrated in pictures the view of the "ancients", and the very different view of a careful observer in Renaissance times. Eventually Galileo arrived at a mathematical characterization, which was a curve called a parabola. The parabola had been known as a mathematical object since ancient times. The Galileo Project recreates some of the experiments Galileo performed, and the steps in reasoning, at http://galileo.rice.edu/lib/student_work/experiment95/paraintr.html.
While it took many hundreds of years to describe the flight of a rock with any kind of precision, primitive men who could throw a rock and hit a target had a sort of practical understanding of it, so it appeared there should be some way to capture it. The use of cannons, well advanced in Galileo's time, provided a strong motive for understanding the phenomena. But first one had to declare Aristotle wrong. And nothing like such a general but precise characterization of the flight of a projectile had ever been done before. One thing that must have become clear early on was that once the cannon was put in a fixed position (including fixed direction and angle), if sufficiently consistent powder loads and balls were used, the ball would land consistently in nearly the same place.
Renaissance scientist/engineers may have had disappointing results in their quest to improve direction of fire through mathematics. At any rate, a couple of centuries later, artilleries tended simply to make a best guess, fire a volley, and if the balls fell short of the target, raise their gun barrels, and if it fell behind the target, lower them. But Galileo did decipher much of the nature of gravity, finding that the weight of the object only mattered when the light object met proportionately more air resistance (though a feather and a stone falls at the same rate in a vacuum).
Anyway, the fascination with the remarkably describable if not quite constant night sky eventually came together with a growing understanding of projectiles - it being true from the beginning that we could, by hook or crook (or catapult or slingshot), get them to go where we wanted them, raising the question "How does that work?". When Newton found himself privy to the great map of the moving solar system with planets moving in strange eliptical orbits rather than circles, as we had expected, and to a good characterization of the workings of gravity on objects in free motion, celestial mechanics was born, and Newton came to symbolize the expectation of some day maybe understanding everything.
A great deal more argument is required to strengthen my claim about the importance of looking in the right direction until it pays off.
Much about stargazing from ancient times until today had to do with looking for significance -- some kind of influence on worldly affairs -- of the Sun or moon "being in" a certain constellation or "house". Those who looked in this direction failed to make any great advance in human knowledge. They were trying to find a relationship between two things that were not related. Why should they not have been? With the limited perspective of the Middle Ages they might have asked us "Was that so much sillier than tracking sunspots to make predictions about the earth's climate?"
To a great extent, knowing where to look is a matter of luck. One needs to look where there just happens to be a phenomenon that is just within reach of explanation using the tools and understandings of this moment. For millennia, the human body was the subject of endless systematizing and theorizing (very understandably so), but it was mostly not the right place to look for the sort of understanding we finally have of how to deal with the body. The end result, starting a couple hundred years go: little by little and step by step aspects of the body became tractable, though even now, it seems to be not tractable as a whole to one person, but only to hundreds dealing with their different aspects.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Approximately where I'm trying to head:
A science must find its (first) Rosetta Stone [[or an aspect revealing clear describable order - that would be striking to anyone capable of understanding the studies]] to get off the ground. Such strikingly orderly phenomena generally have pointed to a "method" or set of methods which become, for while at least, the particular methodology of that science. I am suggesting that without the ability to talk about and study, and draw significant conclusions from more or less perfectly describable (or characterizable) entities such as stars, planets, electrons, atoms, (numerically measurable) heat, seconds of time, etc. so that A's understanding of the entity is almost unquestionably the same as B's understanding, and if these must be demonstrably relatable to the sort of object that motivated the inquiry in the first place, a field of inquiry has not gotten off the ground as a science. If a science has no particular methodology, and can only point to binary experiments for "interesting results" of what it has to say, I suspect it has not gotten off the ground.
POSSIBLE SOURCES OF INFORMATION:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30001/30001-h/30001-h.htm - History of Clockwork
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_power contains some history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_control_tower
Google{ ballistics tables radar "world war ii" }
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_gun_fire-control_system
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