What is geology?
The scientific study of the Earth
What is Environmental Geology
A branch of applied geology
- helps solve conflicts in land use
- minimizes environmental degradation
- maximizes the beneficial results of using our natural and modified environments
What is science?
- Scientia - knowledge
Science in classical antiquity and the middle ages
sought a unified theory of all reality and experience
Science after the 17th and 18th centuries
- age of discovery, industrial and social revolutions
- fragmentation of knowledge
- early modern science (“natural philosophy”) separated from other fields
- nature + philosophy = natural philosophy
- modern geology developed in Scotland in the 1780’s and 1790’s
Limits of (natural) science
- Science is restricted to investigating the natural world
- Science seeks natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us
- Science does not directly deal with questions of ultimate reality
- Science does not directly deal with questions of ethical judgments of values
- Science is only as good as its underlying philosophical assumptions
Philosophical assumptions of modern Science
- There is a physical universe that exists and can be explored by our senses
- The physical universe is orderly, at least on some level
- Uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism
- natural processes operating in the past are the same as those that can be observed operating in the present
- “the present is the key to the past”
- does NOT necessarily mean that rates of natural processes have always been constant
The “scientific method” step 1
Observation: you see an apple fall out of a tree
What is a model (from scientific method)
a representation of an object or system; can be abstract, mathematical, physical, etc.
Scientific Method step 2
Question: what makes it fall?
Scientific Method step 3
Hypothesis
- Possible answer to the question
- Educated guess
- Testable
- Be able to prove they are wrong
Scientific Method step 4
Test
- By performing an experiment
- May involve making a model
- Why use sphere stuff when earth isn’t perfectly spherical?
- close enough
- Why use sphere stuff when earth isn’t perfectly spherical?
- By making a prediction followed by more observation
Scientific Method step 5
Theory
- a hypothesis which has withstood many attempts to disprove it.
Scientific method possible step 6
Law?
- a law is merely a generalization of how nature works; it does not attempt to explain why it works the way it does
Fact?
Problems with the simplified scientific method
- Human reasoning is not always purely inductive
- Scientist are human beings, not machines. They have:
- pre-existing biases and prejudices
- misconceptions and limited ranges of experience
- a knack for making mistakes
