ENVS 2270 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Falsifiability, Atomic Number, Atomic Mass

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Environmental Sciences
• Course: ENVS 2270
• Professor: Kim Bolton

Document Summary

Atomic chemistry: earth is made up of ~90 elements, breathable air = oxygen and nitrogen, people = o, c, h, n, ca, p. Focus on natural world (aims to explain) Benefits from scientific behaviour: good science involves well designed studies/experiments. The scientific method: pragmatic: uses anything that works, no precise definition. Deduction, induction, experiments, math: continuous process of refinement. Hypotheses, theories and laws: a law: general statement about the expectation that certain events will occur where certain conditions are met (ex. law of gravity) Does not tell us why this is (need a theory: hypothesis: human mental construction that provides preliminary explanation of a set of facts, theory: more mature, complex and wide-ranging human mental construction. Provide explanations of the world, used to predict future behaviour: theory or hypothesis that is repeatedly confirmed is provisionally accepted, theory or hypothesis that is overwhelmingly invalidated is rejected (falsifiability) Scientific communication: science is about the possibilities and maybes, not absolute truth.