Ravi, Chitra
(2019)
i wonder..., Editorial, August 2019.
i wonder....
ISSN 2582-1636
Abstract
In a letter to his daughter on her 10th birthday, the biologist Richard Dawkins
introduces science not only as a body of knowledge, but a way of knowing —
one that values evidence rather than tradition, authority, or revelation. Dawkins
writes: “Sometimes, evidence means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling, smelling….)
that something is true…”. But, he continues: “The way scientists use evidence to
learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated...” The entities (like
‘atoms’), organising principles (like ‘evolution’), models (like the ‘Standard Model’),
and methods that characterise modern science are rarely obvious enough to be
discovered by individuals through their own observations of the world. Scientists
construct (and re-construct) this knowledge in order to interpret, explain, and make
predictions about natural phenomena. If validated and agreed on within the
scientific community, it becomes part of the way scientists ‘see’ the natural world
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