Science Matters

The following sections are included:

• Preface

• Contents Summary

• Contents

What is science? The answer is that “everything in Nature is part of science.” On the one hand, what we called “natural science” is actually the science of (mostly) simple systems; they are human-independent knowledge. On the other hand, humanities/social sciences—human-dependent knowledge—belong to the science of complex systems. Demarcation of Nature according to human and nonhuman systems, and the recognition that complex systems are distinct from simple systems allow us to understand the world differently and profitably. For completeness, the nature of simple and complex systems is briefly presented. The origin of the two cultures (made famous by C. P. Snow), humanities and “science,” is traced and some confusing issues clarified. While a gap between humanists and “scientists” does exist due to historical reasons, there is no intrinsic gap between humanities/social science and “natural science.” If these disciplines look different from each other, it is because they are at various level of development, scientifically speaking. To properly bridge the gap and to advance the search for human-dependent knowledge, a new discipline—Science Matters (SciMat or scimat)—is introduced. SciMat treats all human-related matters as part of science, wherein, humans are studied scientifically from the perspective of complex systems with the help of experiences gained in physics, neuroscience and other disciplines. Consequently, all the topics covered in humanities and social sciences are included in SciMat. The motivation and concept of SciMat, and a successful example (histophysics, the physics of human history) are presented and discussed. Four major implications of SciMat are described. In particular, a new answer to the Needham Question is offered for the first time. This chapter ends with discussion and conclusion.

The relationship between science and society is dominated by the media, which act as the middle man going in between the two. Media have their own literary set of rules which basically are those of traditional story telling recipes such as those used in fairy tales. They can be easily applied to some scientific contents as shown by examples. This practice is as old as science itself as shown by the simultaneity of the birth of modern science in the 17^th century and its immediate popularization as texts and images by the “media” of the time. The interplay of the public opinion, shaped by the media, and the conduct of policies in which scientific knowledge is involved, or plain basic culture, is important as demonstrated by history and by contemporary conflicts involving scientific matters. Science is in fact deeply embedded in culture through words and images.

The historical roots and development of physiognomy are presented. This chapter discusses physiognomy as a method to judge by the outer appearance of the main parts, the so-called “signs,” of objects in Nature, including human beings, in order to recognize their properties. The application of this method as described is found in many scientific fields and in the arts, extending from Classical Antiquity through Renaissance Humanism, to Modern Times. In the past, both the scientist and the artist hoped to detect, by observation, the obscure—“ mute” but essential—properties of a natural object. The Aristotelian legacy has been retained in popular medicine (see the doctrine of “signatures”), whereas modern sciences give preference to instrumental and experimental analytical methods. Yet from the 17^th century onward, physiognomy has been used mainly to discover and represent the characteristics of a human being. The holistic approach remains a heuristic method for interpreting the complex nature of humans.

In Michael Persinger's book Neuropsychological Basis of Human Belief (1987), he claimed to have found a causal correlation between the frequency of epileptic seizures affecting the left temporal lobe of human beings, and the frequency of their religious experiences. Rhawn Joseph has argued along the same lines in The Transmitter to Go: The Limbic System, the Soul, and Spirituality (2000). More recently, research on the neural correlate of religious experiences, such as Buddhist and Christian meditation, have become an interesting line of research for neuroscientists. The fact that a neural correlation of every religious experience can be identified, has led some authors to put forward the thesis that religion is fully explainable in terms of neural activity. I will try, first, to clarify whether we are allowed to identify the neural correlation of every human experience (its necessary condition) with its causation (or sufficient condition). Secondly, I will discuss the difference between internalist and externalist approaches in the study of the mind in general, and of the neural correlate of religious experiences, in particular. And thirdly, I will attempt to understand whether neuroscience fully explains the complexity of religious experience.

A physicist's experience in science communication (SciComm), popular science (PopSci) and the teaching of a Science Matters (SciMat) course The Real World is presented and discussed. Recommendations for others are provided.

Communication in science is not just painted on after the science is finished. It is an essential aspect of both the process and understanding of science itself. This chapter sets out the arguments for enhancing scientists' training to include critical thinking and communication skills, and suggests that all science undergraduates should do at least one philosophy course as part of their curriculum.

This chapter discusses a new concept of doing and thinking about chemistry while this scientific field is engaged with new phenomena. The new concept can give new answers to old problems related to the study of receptors. Whereas modern science gives preference to instrumental and experimental as well as analytical methods, a new era has emerged in the field of chemistry—computational chemistry—from the mid-20^th century onward; that is, computer-aided ligand design methodology has been used to study and represent the characteristics of dopamine receptor structures. An explanation for the most significant epistemological approach in the change of notions and in basic phenomena discovered by using the method of computational chemistry (similar to a theoretical/philosophical case study) is given. The philosophical interest of this approach is connected with a different way of looking at chemistry, especially in the case of computational chemistry: It is an epistemological approach because it deals with language and classification in chemistry.

Many debates and a few new perspectives focusing on Chinese sciences appeared recently in China. Here, after some historical and philosophical ideas are reconsidered, a unified ontological perspective is proposed to explain the existence of and the rationality behind the multicultural view of science.

The history of the conceptualization of science communication (or “science popularization”) in China can be classified into four stages. Apparently, the discussion of science popularization evolved from diversified to governmental instructed and to authoritative, and ended up as the goal of raising the public scientific literacy. The last stage is triggered by the worries of the low percentage of scientific literacy in China when compared with that of other countries, as measured in recent years.

Although globalization is quite a fashionable word today, from the standpoint of macrohistory, the migration of human civilization may be traced back to the departure from Africa of the early Homo sapiens; while the modern tendency towards globalization was initiated in as early as the 15^th century when the great geographic discoveries were made. Similarly, although it was not until the first half of the 20^th century that the history of science became a really mature discipline, historical records for a certain branch of natural knowledge and mathematics can be paralleled with relevant intellectual products of early human beings. Adopting dialectic narration, this chapter deals with some hot topics in today's historiography, including globalization, history of science, the Needham Question, the C. P. Snow Thesis and cultural diversity.

The new sciences of evolutionary economics, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics demonstrate how and why markets must be moral in order to function. Trust is the key to understanding market exchange. This chapter discusses the relationship between trust and economic prosperity, as well as the neurochemistry of trust in the form of oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust between strangers in an economic exchange game. Implications for trust, trade, and economic prosperity are considered from this new research.

Quantitative understanding of human behaviors provides elementary but important comprehension of the complexity of many human-initiated systems. A basic assumption embedded in previous analyses on human dynamics is that its temporal statistics are uniform and stationary, which can be properly described by a Poisson process. Accordingly, the interevent time distribution should have an exponential tail. However, recently, this assumption is challenged by extensive evidence, ranging from communication to entertainment to work patterns, that human dynamics obeys non-Poisson statistics with heavy-tailed interevent time distribution. This chapter reviews and summarizes recent empirical explorations on human activity pattern, as well as the corresponding theoretical models for both task-driven and interest-driven systems. Finally, we outline some open questions in the studies of statistical mechanics of human dynamics.

Human history is the most important discipline of study. The complex system under study in history is a many-body system consisting of Homo sapiens—a (biological) material system. Consequently, history is a legitimate branch of science, since science is the study of Nature which includes all material systems. A historical process, expressed in the physics language, is the time development of a subset of or the whole system of Homo sapiens that happened during a time period of interest in the past. History is therefore the study of the past dynamics of this system. Historical processes are stochastic, resulting from a combination of contingency and necessity. Here, the nature of history is discussed from the perspective of complex systems. Human history is presented as an example of Science Matters. Examples of various scientific techniques in analyzing history are given. In particular, two unsuspected quantitative laws in Chinese history are shown. Applications of active walks to history are summarized. The “differences” between history and the natural sciences erroneously expressed in some history textbooks are clarified. The future of history, as a discipline in the universities, is discussed; recommendations are provided.

The following sections are included:

• Contributors

• Index