The Scientific World Picture

  An experiment is a series of repeatable procedures done with standardized steps. It is a technique for producing an outcome. Whether or not a step has been done correctly we determine with a measurement. For the measurement to have been done correctly others must be able to repeat it, both within this experiment and in copies, and get the same number. Objectivity is repeatability of measurements. Measurements are steps that produce numbers or other criteria that can be redone within the same experiment. Other procedures, for example the production of chemical reactions, can often not be redone within an experiment, but only in a copy. Standard steps can be replaced with non-standard steps if they produce the same measurement done with the standard measurement procedure. Measurements need not require instruments, and need not be numbers. In medicine the observed condition of the patient can serve as the measurement. Observations can be experimental steps including measurements, ...

  ​ Real science is experiments. Experiments are collections of standard repeatable procedures performed in a particular order to produce a predicted result. It is because of successful experiments that science has its prestige. It is with experiments made into industrial procedures that we can build airplanes, I-phones, bridges and the like. Chemistry does all its miracle harvests of food, and medicine does all its cures of diseases with experimentally created substances tested by further experiments in the field. The most advanced technology is the product of many experiments all turned into industrial procedures. All these experiments are sets of procedures done here and now, and all one needs to know is what to do with instruments, substances and other things that we can manipulate. Knowledge about what we cannot manipulate, for example an electron, is not necessary to do an experiment. What is needed is to do something we can do and convey how to do to someone else. Knowing ...

For most Americans and many others the time comes, usually in high school, when they decide to accept something as true that they do not understand. Science, you might decide, is not for you. Although you decide that science is not for you, you retain the belief that science, what I call the Scientific World Picture, is at bottom what is real. The world is particles and fields too small or vaporous to see that obey laws. We are made of them. That we act, that we are, is an illusion. All is particles, fields, waves and the like moving according to pointless universal law.You might, although abandoning understanding, continue in scientific study. Memorization of what a teacher thinks important can often get you through. Indeed such a technique can take you far. Much of medical school operates on this principle. In choosing to accept the word of an authority for the ultimate truth, a person decides that reality is beyond his understanding. Such acceptance is a fatal step, for it requires...