Of their personal research lives, much of which is conducted in quiet solitude, scientists might well say, echoing lines from Shakespeare's "As You Like It",
“And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
Research is an attempt to give voice to Nature, inviting it to give us hints as to its secrets. Research -- in the form of observation, experiment, turning patterns into mathematical statements, and exploring the consequences of those statements -- is at the foundation of How Scientists Know.
••••••
Welcome to How Scientists Know, a collection of pages on the tools and methods scientists use to see the unseeable. Each page consists primarily of pointers to YouTube videos, the best ones I could find for emphasizing how we know, more that what we know. It is in how scientists know that I find the best examples of what science is, and how creative it is.*
Seeing the Unseeable
If our knowledge of the world were limited to what we could learn from our senses and our reason, we would miss much that is essential to our full appreciation of our world, as well as to our continued survival. These pages are guides to understanding how scientists work; in particular, how they investigate the invisible — detecting submicroscopic particles like quarks and the Higgs boson; “seeing” molecules; studying magnetic and gravitational fields; imaging black holes; finding planets that orbit distant stars; uncovering genetic relationships among Earth's organisms; learning what causes disease and resistance to treatments; determining how and to what extent our climate is changing, and exploring unrepeatable processes like evolution.
Requests?
Do you ever wonder how scientists know about hidden or seemingly non-intuitive aspects of our world and our universe? If you do, please suggest topics for How Scientists Know. Find my current email address on the home page of One Culture.
••••••
* In case you just wandered in here off the streets, How Scientists Know is a study resource for OLLI courses offered under the program One Culture: Science and the Humanities.
