welcome to our science lecture this is
Professor Diana L Pomeroy and this week
we're going to discuss the nature of
science how does the scientific process
work how a science different from other
fields of study there are many
misconceptions about scientific inquiry
and who makes a good scientist often our
preconceived notions about science from
books TV movies and social media give us
this idea that one science is a
difficult yet linear process that either
ends in fantastic success or absolute
dismal failure failure and to a
scientist is a loner that's a brooding
genius who typically presents as a male
in a lab coat hidden away in a
university somewhere tinkering with all
kinds of chemicals and mechanical
inventions these ideas cannot be further
from the truth
science is a creative lifelong process
and scientists are individuals with a
wide variety of backgrounds and
experiences with any age sexuality
gender race or religion there are many
branches of scientific study and
scientific inquiry can be applied to
solve global problems scientists have
been collaborating on projects for
thousands of years trying to interpret
and understand the natural world around
them science from the latin term ski era
which means to know refers to the city
of the natural world through factual
information these facts are usually
quantifiable which means that they use
numbers and qualitative which means that
they use descriptions these can be
verified over time using repeated
testing against similar phenomena in the
natural world the facts that are
produced in science are called data and
this testing process is called a
prediction or development of a
hypothesis science is an inherently
creative process and contributions to
science have been made by people
the world over these cosplayers at
Barnes and Noble are scientists they're
passionate about understanding the
natural world in particular our
prehistoric past their initiative which
is called cosplay for science combines a
creative ingenuity of cosplay
with the scientific world to educate
people about the scientific process not
everyone that gets involved in the
pursuit of scientific inquiry needs an
academic degree or even a background in
science to consider themselves a
scientist in order to be a scientist you
just need to be curious about the
natural world persistent and attempting
to understand it and willing to work as
part of a team of academics and non
academics alike to advance your ideas or
change them if you find that you get
them wrong this diagram from the
interactive website understanding
science shows the scientific method so
we're taught in school that the
scientific method has multiple steps
we're taught that it's step by step
process of observation and then
hypothesis testing hypothesis publishing
a paper and then you're done and in
actuality the process of science is
cyclical so this process of scientific
inquiry can start and stop at any point
on this diagram scientific study begins
with inquiry an exploration or discovery
and the natural world that prompts
further investigation of an unknown
phenomenon in nature prior to my
research in my master's degree I was
intrigued by a particular group of
dinosaurs they're called Maniraptoran
dinosaurs their evolution into birds is
what it was intrigued by I was curious
about avian flight and how birds lost
several features that are present in
dinosaurs like a long tail teeth and
clawed wings over time while researching
the Jehol biota which is an Early
Cretaceous ecosystem in China I was
introduced to a poorly understood group
of birds with the species name Sapeornis
chaoyangensis and this is the bird
on the right illustrated by Scott
Hartman a handful of papers and articles
have been written about these large
soaring type birds with blunt teeth but
one question immediately bothered me why
did this group of birds I was studying
why were there so many species
that were assigned to this group
so an attempt at answering this question
which is the focus of my master's thesis
that attempt at answering
that question
that's called a hypothesis so a
hypothesis is essentially an attempt at
answering why something happens in
nature right it's a prediction based on
the data that I have so once I posit
this is formulated I once again find out
why there were so many species assigned
to this one group the data toward that
hypothesis is collected and recorded and
then interpreted so that data it will
test the validity of the hypothesis that
I put forward in this case the
information that I put forward in my
thesis either backed that information
or rejected it so this diagram
from understanding science shows the
back and forth nature of data collection
and interpretation as part of this
testing process the process of data
collection for hypothesis is not easy
many steps during this process can go
totally wrong equipment can fail or it
can be faulty travel can be barred for
whatever reason and access to study
materials can be limited there's limits
of what can be studied when as well in
the case of dinosaur paleontology data
collection will go one of two ways so
there's two aspects to dinosaur
paleontology there's the fieldwork
aspect where specimens are actually
excavated out of the ground and for this
you need a series of permits from
various organizations governmental
organizations tribal organizations and
groups it's difficult to excavate
specimens you can't just go out and
start digging in your backyard right so
there's that's one way of going about
collecting data you can actually
excavate specimens and report on what
you find so that's kind of a preliminary
report data that you get from that or
the specimens are already prepared so
the specimens have already been
excavated on the ground
they've already been prepared after
months and years
and they're ready for study and these
specimens are housed in various museum
institutions sometimes they're in the
hands of private collectors but most
often for scientific research an
academic sense its collected and placed
in a museum and so in my case I had the
second route the second path which was
that I had to travel to China to get
access to the specimens that I needed
for my thesis research so thankfully I
was fortunate enough to travel for a
couple weeks in China I went to two
museums with the help of my thesis
supervisor at the time and the two
museums that I visited that housed some
Sapeornis specimens were the
Dalian Natural History Museum in China
and the Institute for vertebrate
paleoanthropology and paleontology
abbreviated as IVPP I went to both of
those locations and I obtained
measurements specimens over again a span
of about a couple weeks in 2011 so I had
the privilege of seeing some extremely
well preserved specimens firsthand and
again the data that I collected it was
not only part of my master's degree but
some of that was actually applied
towards a publication that I had written
as well so I put my hypothesis to the
test by reviewing the literature about
this particular bird group and I
measured specimens digitally and in
person so I did both measurement types
and I made some careful observations so
I described the specimens in full in
particular aspects of skeletal elements
like the skull the limb elements
similarities and differences between the
specimens were recorded so the diagram
on the left shows the process that I
used in measuring specimens digitally as
part of my a thesis work and the chart
on the right which is a published table
it has measurements of different bone
lengths that are used as a comparison
between
specimens that have been marked as
unique species with a age group so
certain
elements here like the skull the scapula
the coracoid these are parts of the
skeleton of the bird and each of these
numbers at the top represents a
different specimen housed at a different
location and so some of these specimens
were grouped as another species
altogether and so I compared these
measurements for my hypothesis and so
for the next phase of the scientific
process once you've got the data
collected what you're going to do next
is actually write up an article and
submit this to the scientific community
so typically this is what scientists do
at least from an academic standpoint is
this community analysis and feedback is
essential for progress in science it's
what we use to essentially fact check
each other and make sure that the data
that we have and then what we're
representing is correct and it's
unbiased that's ideally the goal right
so the data the scientists collect is
summarized in an article a scientific
article and some of these like I said
before some of these are published
online separate from a scientific
journal but most of them undergo a
fairly rigorous peer review process and
the article is either rejected or
accepted in the journal and again this
feedback is absolutely critical at this
stage so this part of the scientific
method can have its pros and cons but in
my case the data that was published was
accepted and it's been published in a
journal called the journal for
vertebrate paleontology now the rest of
the data that I collected during my time
of research that was published in my
master's thesis and that remains in a
repository in the university library so
sometimes work that it's done towards a
thesis or towards a degree some of it
will be published in separate scientific
papers and other times it's published as
a whole volume of work usually as a
dissertation or as a thesis that's then
defended again through peer feedback and
peer review in different methods
so again this whole process takes a span
of months and years a lot of time
scientific study again takes a quite a
long time before information is
disseminated and delivered to the
general public so for now the good news
is is that for now my measurements and
observations have been backed by future
papers and future work and so this is an
image of the beautiful specimen that I
studied while I was visiting the Dalian
museum in China this is an image of the
juvenile Sapeornis  specimen that I was
published on and this kind of
work is again back and forth so for now
the information that I have says that
and future papers have come out saying
that the separate species of this one
group should be collapsed into one
species will this stand the test of time
I don't know and that's one thing that I
think a lot of people don't understand
is that there's a lot of unknowns when
it comes to scientific study and inquiry
and that is okay because scientific
knowledge is simultaneously reliable and
it's also tentative; what this means
is is that as we get new evidence and as
we interpret that evidence old ideas are
going to be gradually replaced or even
supplemented by new ones so even after
publication the work is not done
hypotheses can be changed information
can change and just as an example these
illustrations of the dinosaur
Brontosaurus they're about a hundred
years apart from each other and they
show that our ideas about the natural
world have changed a lot in just that
short span of time
so a primary goal of science is the
formation of theories and laws which are
terms that have specific meanings to
science so this Venn diagram from Sydney
com shows the definition of a theory in
the left blue circle and the definition
of a scientific law in the right yellow
circle and how those definitions overlap
in the green portion in the middle
Theory explains why natural phenomena
occur laws summarize a set of
observations about natural phenomena and
both theories and laws are based on
hypotheses they can be used to make
predictions and they can be revised over
time
a scientific theory is a well-tested
explanation that unifies a broad range
of observations that's never just a
theory scientific theories are built on
hundreds of years of worth of work from
multiple branches of science to explain
how or why something happens in the
natural world multiple
hypotheses will merge to show a pattern
that gives rise to an explanation that
is a scientific theory an example of a
scientific theory is shown on this slide
we have a cladogram which is like an
evolutionary family tree of mammal
evolution from the Alf Museum in
Claremont so the theory of evolution
explains how species have changed
through time
scientific law is a concise mathematical
or verbal statement that expresses a
fundamental principle of science laws
show that a phenomenon will occur based
on a calculation or experimental model
an example is the law of gravity which
shows that objects with lesser mass will
be drawn towards those with a greater
mass base an equation that's listed on
this slide
gravity affects everything in the known
universe including space and time itself
which we'll discuss in the next lecture
science is a human endeavor scientific
understanding inquiry are not perfect by
any means experiments can fail
hypotheses can be rejected and there are
biases and prejudices that people
encounter as they work with one another
despite this what keeps people in science
is the goal to seek the truth about the
natural world and its phenomena our
ability to work together globally and
communicate better to reduce stigma
within and outside of the scientific community
has improved drastically since
scientific studies began thousands of
years ago it will continue to improve in
the age of the internet and as our
communication gets stronger science
changes as our understanding of the
world changes and this does all the time
so as an example a new paper on dinosaur
research has published every few weeks
so it used to be every few months -
every few years and now it's every
couple weeks or so there's a new
discovery that's being made and reported
on so this discovery is first reported
in scientific journals and then it's
released and related online by various
scientific journalists and editors and
produced to the general public we know
more about the earth and its life now
than we did a mere fifty years ago and
there's still a lot left to explore and
understand
geologists and or scientists study the
earth as a system there are several
parts to the whole picture
this course will cover topics from
geology which includes the study of
rocks and minerals oceanography which is
the study of the oceans meteorology
which is the study of weather and
climate and astronomy which is the study
of space all of these aspects are
integral parts of Earth science
the deforming spheres of the Earth's
system itself so in this I'm using
what's known as the Gaia hypothesis
which states that there are multiple
spheres of the earth system that are
operating together to allow the earth to
function as a dynamic planet so those
spheres of the Earth system are as follows
we have the geosphere which includes
rocks and minerals the hydrosphere which
includes water so all the water in
earth's (i've lumped together the
hydrosphere and the cryosphere in this
particular course) atmosphere which are
air masses and the biosphere which
includes living things all of these
things work together to allow life to
exist here the origins of Earth and the
way its peers interact with one another
as we understand it is limited to the
data that we have and these data give us
a means to protect our planet for
generations to come
in the next lecture we'll learn about
the origins of the universe and the
solar system and understand our place in
it I hope you enjoyed this lecture on
scientific inquiry and thanks for
watching
