HOW SCIENCE IS USUALLY DONE

I see the prez has given his opinion on Intelligent Design. I have no problem with teaching this in a philosophy, history, or history of science class. I do have big problems with teaching it in any kind of experimental science class.

In an ideal world there is a way that science is done. I know that this is far from an ideal world but be patient with me. Calling something a theory doesn.t mean it hasn’t been proven. In a way it’s a carry over from the times that modern science was getting started.

Let me use the boiling temperature of water as an example. It.s something that can be tested using a thermometer and a barometer. Incidentally, this experiment probably was never done or at least published in Italy until after the influence of the Roman Church had begun to decline. You see both use something that the church said couldn’t exist-a vacuum. But, that’s a story for another day.

Say a curious scientist notices that when water is heated vapor comes off of it and if you heat it long enough it boils. He does this under controlled conditions, takes its temperature and gets a consistent result of 212 degrees. For the sake of argument, the scientist is English and lives in London. London is as close to see level as you can get.

Say our Englishman writes regularly to a colleague in the Scottish Highlands and he spends his time perched a thousand feet or so higher. He tries the same experiment but doesn’t get quite the same results. They scratch their heads and both write to a mutual friend perched on the top of a Swiss Alp. He tries the experiment and gets a different and lower temperature. Finally, one of them has a glowing light bulb moment and realizes that the decreased temperature is tied to the decrease in air pressure as elevation increases.

That’s how science is supposed to work. Someone gets an idea and designs an experiment to test it. The results are shared. Somebody else follows the same steps and either gets the same results or they don’t. At that point they hash it out, start over and work on it until the original results are either verified or they aren’t. Trying to force science to conform to a particular dogma only results in bad science. It doesn’t help faith either.

Claiming that there is more than one side to an argument and it's only fair to present all of them works in a philosophy class. It doesn't belong in science class.