Harry again this is the last in a four-part series answering the question what is science taken from the items of the natural science quiz by Larry flamer so we'll be looking at these four items here firstly so you can see they're in red there are some Concepts there what I want you to do with those is to pause the film and I want you to list them in what you think is the most scientific all the way down to the least scientific draw a line and then underneath that line place any concepts there which you think are not scientific okay so have a go with that press um pause and then come back to the video okay welcome back so this is my attempt at organizing that list into scientific and non-scientific ideas so you can see there the two that I've placed below are ancient text and divine revelation so when we look at why those are deemed to be non-scientific Concepts because visitations from ghosts and information from Angels or aliens um generally tend to happen just to one person and so therefore they're untestable because there no one else gets visited by the same Angel and get the same message and they're unverifiable the same thing with ancient texts and whether they are ascribed onto stone or onto animal hide or come from an authority like Aristotle just because their ancient does not make them correct which a lot of people who promote pseudo Sciences actually claim that knowledge uh ancient knowledge is better than modern knowledge probably a better way at having a looking at these Concepts is via Vin diagram so you can see their divine revelation and knowledge just because it's ancient and knowledge just because it's modern are not necessarily scientific what makes them scientific is they need to go through this process over there on the left in the middle there you can see hunches and insights and anecdotes or case studies and these are an important part of science but they can also be non-scientific because they inform the uh the creation of hypotheses so what we'll be doing now is we'll be going through those so as an example of hunters and insights is uh this guy here Kula so one day Kay was a famous chemist and during a d Daydream he uh he hypothesized or he came up with the idea uh of the aborus to explain the structure of benzene which you can see there is a six carbon molecule and so from this he was able to hypothesize that Benzene was uh six carbons and formed a ring from that he developed hypothesis experimented and was able to verify that that was indeed the structure and subsequently we now have modern methods which we can verify that that is the correct structure for Benzene so when we have a look at these definitions of hypothesis now quite often we tell students that a hypothesis is a guess or an educated guess when an actual fact it's a lot more than that a hypothesis is a testable statement that explicitly predicts a causal link between two or more variables so let's have a look at a couple of examples hypotheses have the general form of an if then because statement so let's look at an experiment where a child gets plants and investigating whether light uh is required for plants to grow so they might write hypothesis like this if plant a is put in the Sun and plant B is put in the dark so that would be their independent variable the amount of light then plant a will grow more than plant bees so this is the prediction what you also note is that they're actually predicting the direction of effect there that plant a will grow more than plant B that's the de pending variable and then the last part of our hypothesis is the explanation so this student has researched a bit found out about photosynthesis and says is because this is how plants make their food for growth now this is what we would call a laboratory experiment because a lot of the variables can be controlled and manipulated and so forth let's have a look at another example example where the control of the variables is impossible so this researcher is looking at the differences between boys and girls so they're looking at uh how into cars boys and girls are so they formulate this hypothesis so if boys are more into cars than girls so the sex of the person there is the independent variable so that that's the variable which is going to be different between the two groups then more boys will go to Grand Prix races so they're going to me meure their dependent variable gr pre attendance and they finally give a reason so unlike the first example where they're able to control the variables they can't truly control the variables here um and the variables are a lot looser so this is what we will call a natural experiment but what's important here is that there's the manipulation of the independent variable and the measurement of a DPed variable so from hypothesis these are then tested by experiments which then give us conclusions and then from that ultimately you might get something which is a law and a law a lot of people think it sits above a theory in terms of they're important to science but really all a law is is a statement of relationship between variables but it's not explanatory so for example Newton's three laws of motion they describe how things move but they don't actually explain why they do so the same with the gas laws or with mle's laws of inheritance Hook's law just looks at the um the behavior of Springs and the law of conservation of mass they don't then go on to explain what uh why there is a relationship between those variables they simply State there is a relationship the queen of all uh knowledge within science is a theory and in theory is an explanatory framework and it needs to be supported by multiple lines of evidence that has explanatory power which is uh What uh a law does but it also needs to have predictive power so a theory should be able to generate hypotheses which can then go and explore different aspects of that theory so for example cell theory U germ Theory within biology then there's Quantum field Theory or quantum mechanics theory of special relativity and general relativity within physics and string theory Big Bang Theory these are all theories of course they explain much much more phen aspects of a phenomenon than an an actual law does so where a theory in uh every day is um would be aced to a guess that is actually what we're trying to aim for within the Sciences in developing theories theories are our top uh explanations that we have in science so let's have a look at this statement here anything done scientifically can be relied upon to be accurate and reliable so you can see a screenshot there of a Google search for broccoli is good for you so these two items here they state that broccoli is good for you where there is whereas these two links here uh question how effective or how good for you broccoli is um so which is it and quite often this occurs with Cutting Edge science and especially when you're not an expert within a particular field field the best uh plan of attack there is to go with the weight of evidence you need to look at everything all the research which has come before this and see where the current finding for this particular piece of research fits within all of that and so what we should do when we're not experts in the field is look at the weight of evidence let's have a look at the disagreements between scientists is one of of the weaknesses of Science and let's look at the research into what is light and what is the nature of light so for example um Newton when he was doing his research he was saying that wave was a particle and so he did a whole He of experiments and he show he was able to show that light was a particle however this guy hians he actually he uh also did experiments but his experiments show that live was a light was a wave so they argued backwards and forwards and it wasn't until modern science and a whole heap of other scientists came along and and settled the argument and essentially what they said was that light has a dual nature that it is both has wave like properties and particle like properties depending upon the situation and so what we can what we can see there is that within science there is disagreement and disagreement is actually encouraged but and the disagreement between the two camps may actually end up with being a third possibility where they are actually both correct where both parties are correct and you can see here in the uh nature of light so here let's have a look at science can be influenced by race gender nationality or religion of the scientists so yes at a basic level because we're all humans our interpretation of data and how we conduct the experiments and so on are certainly influenced by our biases which uh come from our race our gender nationality and religion and so on but because of the nature of science in that science is firstly peer-reviewed science in the long run is actually self-correcting on a societal Level Society actually determines the areas of science we actually investigate so for example within the US when George W Bush was in power thei uh he actually uh disagreed with Research into stem cell uh into stem cells and so for a long time the US fell further and further behind in terms of stem cell research so you can see there the science which is investigated by scientists is actually influenced by politicians and Society at large so that most certainly is true and the last statement that we'll have a look at is scientists have solved the major Mysteries of the of nature when we have a look at the number of species that bi biologists have actually discovered estimates place the number of the percentage of species discovered as 14% so there are still plant many plants and animals in rainforest at the bottom of the oceans and so on which remain undiscovered so that's within biology alone when we have a look at physics when we have a look at the amount of stuff in the universe we only actually comprise .4% of stuff in the universe there is this stuff called interlaced gas which is mainly hydrogen that's 3.6% but then the remainder 96% is stuff called a dark energy and dark matter and we have and the reason why it's called Dark is because we aren't able to observe it with our instruments so we call it dark energy and dark matter so there is plenty of scope there for research within biology and also in in uh physics so here are the references that we have and to finish off with here is a few words from Ken for