 This video is about science versus non-science, designed for my PSC-152 course. As you've been learning in the textbook readings, science is a process for learning about the world and describing the world. It also represents the knowledge gained by this process. It involves certain key elements such as hypothesis and experimenting and interpreting data. And the key, key element there is it's got to be testable, testable, testable. If you cannot test it, it's not scientific. There's a few other things in there such as it has to be repeatable. If you do the experiment and somebody else does the experiment and you don't get the same results, that's a problem. Science self-limits itself to natural processes and cause and effect and does not involve the supernatural. And it's also tentative. And what I mean by that is that as new information comes up, science has to be willing to revise our understanding based on that new information. So then what's non-science? Well, it's basically all other ways to learn and describe the world. It includes philosophy, art, religion, history. You could put in their culture and probably a bunch of other things as well. And the key here is that they don't follow the scientific method. But that's not a value judgment. We still have a place for philosophy and art and religion and history. And we need those in our lives to have full and rich lives. But they're not the same thing as science. You can think of it as the difference between a hammer and a saw. A hammer and a saw don't do the same thing, but they're still both valuable tools. And if you try to use a hammer on a situation that's more fit for a saw or you try to use a saw in a situation that's more fit for a hammer, it's just not going to work as well. So we have to understand what science is and when it's valuable and when it works really well. But we also have to understand that there's a place for non-scientific approaches to the world, philosophy, art, etc. And that those have a place to be used in their own place. So let's give an example of something. And this one should be a pretty obvious example. Here's two statements. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. And what chemical compounds cause roses to smell sweet? Well, obviously the first one is not science. It's actually a quote from Shakespeare, but it really involves a philosophy about the world. And we can learn a lot and think about that statement to help us understand our lives better. But if you want to actually make a perfume that smells like roses, you have to actually dig in a little deeper and figure out the chemical compounds that causes roses to smell sweet. And that would be done with science. And here's another example. Is spending time in nature good for your soul? Well, we can measure time, but we can't measure our soul. So that would have to be non-science because the soul is not a natural part of our world. It would be considered a supernatural part of our world. But you could scientifically measure how does time spent in nature affect a person's blood pressure? So we're measuring something here now very specific. So how does it affect our blood pressure as opposed to how does it affect our soul? Now let's take this example just a little bit deeper. What kind of hypothesis could we put forward about nature and blood pressure? Well, I grade a lot of science fairs at the lower levels, and a lot of time I'll see a very simple statement like more time in nature lowers blood pressure. And that's a good starting point for an investigation. And if that were true, you might then move on to say, well, I'm going to hypothesize that spending one hour in nature will result in a resting blood pressure drop of at least 10% compared to spending one hour in an urban setting. And depending on what you get from that, you have to consider very carefully, how did I control my experiment? Did I measure the same person at the same time of day? What were they doing in nature versus what were they doing in an urban setting? And make sure that our experiment is really well designed to be able to measure those things. And then you're probably going to end up getting a lot of related questions like, does it matter what age or gender the person is? Does it matter what they were doing when they were in nature? Does the effect last for a little while or a long while? Can you get the same effect just by looking at pictures of natural settings? So science again becomes a fuller, richer process that involves more than just a single question and a single hypothesis. Now here's another example. Bear with me here. Do extraterrestrial aliens exist? Now some of you might look at this question and immediately say, well, no, that's not scientific. It could be. It depends on how we approach this question. In science we have to follow the evidence. What evidence do we have for extraterrestrial aliens? What would that evidence look like? How would we determine whether something is extraterrestrial or not? And then we have to recognize the limits. When I say exist, does that mean anywhere in the universe or just does it exist the places I've looked at? Have I looked hard enough? Etc. Now recognizing that you could put forward a reasonable hypothesis such as within our solar system there does not seem to be any evidence for extraterrestrial aliens. But then you have to keep testing. Now at some point when there's been no evidence for extraterrestrial aliens anywhere in our solar system for a long time, most scientists would say, I'm going to put forward the hypothesis that no, they don't exist and I'm not going to worry about it anymore. But science allows other people to continue testing coming up with new observations and new experiments they could do. And if for some reason one of those experiments which was shown to be well controlled in a quality experiment gave us new evidence, then we'd have to revise our possibility and say maybe they do exist. That leads us into pseudoscience which is something that presents itself as scientific but doesn't follow the process or is missing key elements. So there are people out there who regardless of how much evidence or non-evidence that we found regarding aliens refuse to put forward a reasonable hypothesis or refuse to change their opinions based on the information that we've seen. And that's when it crosses into pseudoscience. And while I don't have a value judgment about non-science, I do have a problem with things presenting themselves as scientific when they don't follow it. Some of the main things that happen are when something is not actually testable. When it's not reproducible, they claim that they've done an experiment and found a result but no one else can repeat that experiment and get their results. And then the last one is when people refuse to revise their hypothesis based on additional information the results of the experiments. That's when something goes into being a pseudoscience. Now, I could spend a lot more time talking about science versus non-science but we're going to leave this here for now. Again, my students will have an activity to complete about science versus non-science and you'll find the details of that on Blackboard.