All About Science

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• A Note on Chinese Names
• Contents Summary
• Contents

There is a lot of confusion and misconception concerning Science. The nature and contents of science is an unsettled problem. For example, Thales of 2,600 years ago is recognized as the “Father of Science” but the word science was introduced only in the 14^th century, and so it is obvious wrong if science is understood as modern science only, which started with Galileo about 400 years ago. If science is mainly about nonliving systems, then social science cannot be part of science. And if social science is part of science, then why the humanities, which are also about humans, are not part of science? All these confusions and dilemmas concerning science could be traced to the historical evolution of the word and concept of Science and the many misconceptions perpetuated by various philosophers and historians of science, due to the lack of an agreed-upon definition of science. This chapter aims to clear up all these confusions by retracing the historical development of science—the word, concept and practice. The nature of knowledge, Nature, religion and philosophy are covered. A simple definition of science according to scimat, the new discipline that treats all human-dependent matters as part of science, is provided. Three important lessons learned about science, including the required Reality Check (which differentiates science from other forms of knowledge) are given. Important ramifications from this definition concerning antiscience and pseudoscience in particular are discussed.

Within the last century, four new (sub)disciplines related to science were added to the humanities. They are Philosophy of Science, History of Science, Sociology of Science, and Science Communication. While these disciplines did contribute positively, they had also caused all sorts of problems towards people's understanding of science. What happened and why it happened? This chapter tries to answer this question with new insights gleaned from our historical and cultural heritage of thousands of years. The aim here is not to give a full review of the four disciplines but to analyze them from the perspective of scimat, coming from a humanist and physicist with experience in simple and complex systems. In particular, the mistakes of Ernest Mach, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and David Bloor and why they occurred are analyzed from a new angle. It has to do with the time-evolving nature of the scientific process, obliviousness of the differences between simple and complex systems, failure of the educational system, and the underdevelopment of the humanities. Suggestions for the near future are provided.

Opposite to the objectivity and the readiness-made of scientific thinking, phenomenology in philosophical thinking manifests the intentionality and the constructivity. And the analysis of the constructivity of intentionality is exactly the reflection. The traditional philosophy of science is a “positive thinking.” A phenomenological philosophy of science is a reflective philosophy of science which makes it possible to understand science in the broad sense, to investigate the metaphysical foundations of modern science, and to integrate questions concerning foundation of science with the broader mode of life. It also allows us to understand the trend of modern society and the reflection of modernity, and change the problem of demarcation between science and non-science into the problem of investigating the conditions of possibility that enables “non-science” to be science. With the phenomenology approach, philosophy of science transits from methodology and epistemology to ontology.

There were plenty of technical knowledge in ancient Chinese civilization, but no independently existing scientific-culture system. The ancient Chinese, while moving along their own tradition, had not step onto the road of modern science and technology. This is the Needham Question, which was being attributed to a cultural problem by Max Weber and then to a cultural context in Confucianism by Mou Zong-San. But more importantly, the fact is that the political power in ancient Chinese society had a function of controlling and limiting the development of scholastic culture. This phenomenon appeared not just in ancient China but also in China's modernization process since 1840.

Recently the largest refrigerator in the world—the £4.4 billion new instrument operating at CERN, Geneva—was inaugurated and running. The machine's purpose is to smash together high energy protons in order that scientists can learn about the world of matter, identify what the world is really made of, and discover the Higgs particle which confers mass on all the other particles. The Higgs boson was indeed found in 2012 and a Nobel Prize was awarded to the theorists the next year. My purpose in this article is not to denigrate this example of one of mankind's achievements, but to point out a number of problem areas in science which do not get much publicity, and which address the question of what scientists know.

From the traditional viewpoint of holism, we know how to deal with a whole only when we do understand what the whole is. But from the perspective of methodology, “what is a whole” or “what kind is a whole” is not decided by the object itself in ontology but by “how to deal with the whole” in methodology. We thus need to make a paradigm shift from rigid ontological premise to methodological pragmatism, regarding the whole as a methodological hypothesis. And there are two kinds of holism in methodology: One is constitutive holism which regards an object as the constitutive whole (including entity, structure or function) and solves it through constitutive methods; the other is generative holism which regards an object as the generative process and deals with it through generative rules. However, neither kind has the strength of the other. It is necessary to think of a whole as a methodological concept in a strong sense, while taking it as an ontological reality in a weak sense.

The story of helicobacter is summarized. The story illustrates the ease and difficulty of a new discovery.

Based on the science conditions in Victorian era (1837-1901) in England, we point out the deficiency of Friedrick Engel's thesis concerning the three great scientific discoveries in the 19^th century. Moreover, we question Mitsutomo Yuasa's thesis on the rule governing the shift of the world's scientific center, which has been popular since the 1960s. Both theses were widely accepted in China.

This chapter describes how medical sciences at University of Coimbra evolved over the course of the 19^th century, and in the process highlights the relationship between the Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Philosophy. In the mid-19^th century the two Faculties were the scene of an effort to reform their teaching methods, on the basis of relationships they established with a number of prestigious European scientific institutions. Their research concentrated on the biological, physiological and chemical foundations of life. The creation of laboratories of experimental physiology, histology, toxicology and pathological anatomy was the result of the reorganization of the medical faculty at Coimbra University from 1866-1872, according to the following paradigm replacement: the superficial look at disease was replaced by the study of the inner body and an attempt to understand the symptoms, giving rise to a new paradigm of medical practice—evidence-based medicine. In this chapter, we give an overview of this process which enhanced the European influence upon the development of medical studies in Portugal.

The story of the founding of the International Liquid Crystal Society in 1990 is told here for the first time. The founding process lasted three years starting 1987 and is quite different from the usual case concerning other learned societies. A personal account of the why and how as well as the background and crucial events is given. It is written for those working in or interested in science, liquid crystals in particular, and for science historians.

There have been two waves of science studies and an attempt is being made to establish a Third Wave. The waves are described in outline. Science Matters works within the First Wave. Along the way it is argued that the human sciences are fundamentally different from the natural and biological sciences. It seems that Science Matters has failed to recognize this.

Historically it is rare that one could do scientific research and political revolution at the same time. Such a chance was offered to me in China from 1978 to 1983. Throughout these six years, solitons (i.e., localized waves that travel without, or with slight, change in velocity and shape) were one of my major research topics at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was a hot topic in the physics community worldwide. In this chapter, the development of soliton research and political revolution in China experienced by the author is reported. The aim is not just to keep a record for those memorable years but also to convey the excitement of the so-called “Science Spring” of 1978, the year China's reform-and-opening up revolution began.

In recent years, the term “scientific culture” has been used frequently by scholars in mainland China. Although this term is very popular in many disciplines such as history, philosophy and sociology of science as well as in science policy and education studies, researchers in these fields have different study objectives, positions, approaches and styles. It is thus interesting to analyze this phenomenon, which may help readers to understand Chinese scholars' attitudes toward science. Wang Rong-Jiang has reviewed in 2011 the history of scientific culture studies in China during the past 20 years. He has systemically (though not comprehensively enough) introduced conferences, research books and articles on scientific culture, and briefly analyzed the differences between different approaches. Building on this review, scientific culture in contemporary China is presented from our own observations and perspectives here.

At first it looks simple. Communication is the transfer of information from A to B, from one person to another. Therefore “science communication” (scicomm) must be the transfer of scientific information from A to B. This common sense idea has been the dominant view of scicomm for many years and has helped to shape debates about “scientific literacy” and the “public understanding of science”. However, it is a view that is dependent upon a specific history of science and it is an idea that has been challenged in recent years. This chapter will show: Firstly, how present day ideas about scicomm were created in the 19^th century; secondly, how two historical moments from the 20^th century helped shape current understanding of scicomm; and finally, how that understanding has recently been challenged. The main aim of the chapter is to argue that scicomm should not be seen simply as the transfer of information but rather that it is better understood in terms of how meanings about the natural world are created and negotiated. Material for this chapter is drawn principally from the UK and the United States. However, similar developments can be found in other countries not least because they often copied what was happening in the UK and the US.

Early science communication in modern China lasts from the 1840s till the beginning of the 20^th century. For about 60 years, popular-science articles and books was one of the main approaches to bring scientific and technological knowledge to the public and to arm them with scientific thinking. This chapter deals with how popular-science writing has sprouted in the modern Chinese society and gives a historical introduction to the popular-science works at different stages.

Scholars from Socrates and Leonardo to Charles Le Brun, Friedrich Wölfflin and recently David Freedberg have explored how viewers empathize with art works. Together with many other thinkers, they have suggested that empathy is best understood through studying human nature. Freedberg applies neuroscientific data on mirror neurons (brain-cells that provide the basis for empathic reactions) to examine viewer engagement with a variety of art works. His argument privileges neural processes and challenges the importance of cultural explanations of viewer engagement (for example social, political and religious). The contextual brain is a concept that seeks to reconcile neuroscientific arguments with context based explanations. It is based on an understanding of mirror neurons and neural plasticity (how the human brain changes as a result of experience or training) and is applied to the particular case of Caravaggio's paintings in 17^th century Rome.

Role-playing games (RPG) is the most important type of video games, for both PC and online games. In the last decade or so, video games with a spy theme were pretty common and have become an important genre in games. This chapter discusses, from the narrative and cultural perspectives, the identity and pleasure of the RPG player, and analyses the text construction in the multinarration of spy games. The discussion is divided into three parts: (1) How does a spy game tell a story? We will do a narrative analyze and find out how the narrative scheme causes pleasure in the player. (2) What stories are told by spy games? Putting these stories among the various post-9/11 texts, we can see what kind of “tacit writing” is provided by the spy games. (3) Starting from these game texts we discuss what special role is played by spy games in the video game industry, in the global political and economic system, and what effects result from it.

The image of physics is connected with simple “mechanical” deterministic events: an apple always falls down; force equals mass times acceleration. Indeed, applications of such concept to social or historical problems go back two centuries (population growth and stabilization, by Malthus and by Verhulst). However, since even today's computers cannot follow the motion of all air molecules within one cubic centimeter, the probabilistic approach has become fashionable since Ludwig Boltzmann invented Statistical Physics in the 19^th century. Computer simulations in Statistical Physics deal with single particles, a method called agent-based modeling in fields which adopted it later. Particularly simple are binary models where each particle has only two choices, called spin up and spin down by physicists, bit zero and bit one by computer scientists, and voters for the Republicans or for the Democrats in American politics (where one human is simulated as one particle). Neighboring particles may influence each other, and the Ising model of 1925 is the best-studied example of such models. This chapter will explain to the reader how to program the Ising model on a square lattice (in Fortran language); starting from there the readers can build their own computer programs. Some applications of Statistical Physics outside the natural sciences will be listed.

The following sections are included:

• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index