STM+Week+01


 * “The Myth of the Magical Scientific Method” -**Response

Dr. Terry Halwes continues on with his crusade against general ignorance by narrowing in on one of the points touched upon in the previous article, “The Scientific Method”. Not only has this idea of a universal solution to scientific discovery been wrong since its creation, but it has also been continually pushed into the minds of the general population as an undeniable truth, through books, shows, and members of the previous generation who were raised in the same manner. This continuing cycle shows how easily human minds can be molded into believing something that is so blatantly wrong that you would have to be blind not to run into numerous contradicting sources and examples on a regular basis. My biggest complaint and one of Halwes’ is that “The Scientific Method” tries to make the point that all science is based on theories and hypothesizes that are tested by experiments that then created a positive or negative result. This completely overlooks, despite its huge presence in the mind of the general population, the most obvious and one of the more “romantic” aspects of science, Discovery through random testing and observations. In this article, Halwes points out one of the more common variations of “The Scientific Method” as containing the idea of “testing theories by logically deducing hypotheses”. Although this approach is completely appropriate in some situations, it cannot fully encompass the needs of the expansion of scientific knowledge. What if, as it has happened in the past, our logic, which we felt was firmly founded on the lessons of our forefathers, was actually wrong, but if everyone followed “The Scientific Method” to the letter, we would never be able to see that some part of our general knowledge no longer stood firm compared to newer discoveries. Had everyone taken the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe as fact and had they all followed “The Scientific Method” then no one would have ever taken the time to stop and think “What if they’re wrong and we revolve around something else?” This idea would not be logical because it would be going against past precedents that constituted the core knowledge of the day. For science the truly evolve and advance as it has for centuries, we need people to step back and question what we think we know as a people. They may be called “crackpots” and “loonies”, but they hold the chance of unlocking some new fount of knowledge that could not be fathomed by conventional logic. As Halwes points out in other articles, we can never be fully positive on the validity of any piece of knowledge, as history has shown us that everything is up for re-imagination and replacement by the waves of new knowledge guaranteed to follow. Now I only managed to touch on one aspect of Halwes’ argument against “The Scientific Method”, but I felt that covering more of his ideas would require an undertaking greater than the standard “response” and more akin to an “essay” or “paper”.