 Hello everybody! We're here to do our second lecture in our general biology course. This lecture is on the process of science. Our last lecture was on life. Biology is the study of life, sort of a fundamental concept leading into a class about life. Biology is a science class and having an entire lecture on the process of science I think is really important. I have to say that not only do I think learning about the process of science is important period in any science class, that's something that I've always felt, but I feel an increased urgency in ensuring that humans out there understand the process of science and what it does and what it doesn't do, which means we have an entire nine-part lecture just on this topic. We're gonna start out with some definitions. You'll notice that I have a website up right now and this website is one of my primary go-tos when I am looking for information about science. This site is phenomenal. It addresses the process of science. It has incredible resources, great diversity of different kinds of scientists, different kinds of science that's being done, and my most favorite part is this little visual here that we're gonna spend some time looking at, but it does a really awesome job of talking through how the process of science is rarely linear and it's often sort of creative and exciting, which depending on your exposure to science, that may not be your experience with a process of science. So before we begin, let's go ahead and do some definitions. I'm gonna write down some definitions. This whole lecture is going to be, I find this stuff difficult to organize because there's a lot of information and there's a lot of, well this is true and this isn't true and what about this and how do you think about this one? This list of definitions is a bunch of definitions that are commonly, they're differently used in science than they are maybe in common language or in the media or every day. So I am a little bit sad to write this first one down for you because I, well when I write it down for you, you will see perhaps why I'm sad. I'm a little sad that we have to spend some time defining the word fact because it's one of those that like I would not have thought that the word fact was debatable but it is and so I'm gonna give you a definition that's just gonna guide our, like the way we use words in this class. A fact is a statement we know to be true through direct observation. The next definitions that we're gonna look at, bit better. I'm gonna give you the next one. I'm not done with fact but I'm gonna give you the next one. The next one is theory and this I think hopefully will help you see why I included fact in this list of definitions. In science a theory is a broad explanation. I'm gonna write that down. A broad explanation that's usually supported by many lines of evidence supported by many lines of evidence. Okay, I hope this handwriting is okay for you. Theory is a word that we've always had a difference in the way we use the word in science compared to the way we use the word every day and commonly. When I say I have a theory when I'm hanging out at the dinner table I'm saying this is my random idea and a theory doesn't always carry a lot of weight in our common use of the word. In science a theory is as close as you can get to something that's really really really really true. As we will learn science is a process that gives us information but it's always changing. A theory has so much evidence that is supporting it that it carries a tremendous amount of weight. You can hear the difference in how we use the word theory commonly and how we use the word theory in science. It's disappointing to me that there is a difference in how the word fact may be used commonly. That's new. With the advent of alternative facts I want to be very very clear that in this class that like there really aren't alternative facts. There are things we know are true based on direct observation and that's how we're going to use the word. Just like in this class when we talk about a theory we're going to talk about a broad explanation supported by many lines of evidence. The other word there's a couple more here that have different uses hypothesis. We're going to talk about this word a lot and so we'll have we'll have more words to say about hypothesis but I'm going to give you a definition now. A hypothesis commonly is similar to theory it's like a guess commonly. Not how we use it in science. In science it is a proposed explanation so think about that. Proposed I think I spelled that wrong. A proposed explanation for to explain a narrow set of observations so it's really specific it's kind of narrow and there are some things that are true. It's a proposed explanation that is testable so you have to be able to design some kind of test to check it and it's falsifiable and this we're gonna again we're gonna talk about this a little bit more but I just want to throw it at you. That means that you can provide evidence that your hypothesis is not true. You know what you're looking for that will tell you that oh that is not true and it has explanatory power. It tells you something about what you already know and has explanatory power. So hypothesis is a really specific type of thing that we build or we generate in the sciences. Okay I have two more for you. The next one I have is law and this is another one where you're gonna see laws used in science they usually are generalizations based on a lot of data so they carry explanatory power or predictive power but they are less clear than like a theory. A theory if something's labeled a theory you know there are many many many lines of evidence from lots of different areas that support this idea. A law is used a little more muscially in science. I want it out there we're gonna see some laws you may wonder why is this a law and not a theory we can have that conversation when it comes up. The last one I want to address is the scientific method and I want to address this because this is most of y'all have experienced science through the lens of the scientific method and it's basically a recipe for doing science. It's very linear when I say recipe I'm like that's exactly what it is. I always I hate to admit this as a science human I always kind of didn't love science labs because they felt like recipes for doing a thing it wasn't discovery it wasn't question asking it was following a recipe and the scientific method to me is not super inspiring whereas the process of science is super inspiring and interesting. In the next lecture let's look at the process of science and sort of the next section we'll look at the process of science and how it is different than the scientific method.