Law in Science Example

Read on to get more science stuff you might like. The term «scientific law» has traditionally been associated with the natural sciences, although the social sciences also contain laws. [11] For example, Zipf`s law is a law in the social sciences based on mathematical statistics. In these cases, laws may describe general trends or expected behaviours rather than being absolute. «In science, laws are a starting point,» said Peter Coppinger, associate professor of biology and biomedical engineering at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. «From there, scientists can then ask the following questions: `Why and how?` Some laws are only approximations of other more general laws and are good approximations with limited scope. For example, Newtonian dynamics (based on Galilean transformations) is the low-velocity limit of special relativity (since the Galilean transformation is the slow approximation of the Lorentz transformation). Similarly, Newton`s law of gravity is a low-mass approximation of general relativity, and Coulomb`s law is an approximation of long-range quantum electrodynamics (relative to the range of weak interactions). In such cases, it is customary to use simpler and approximate versions of the laws instead of the more specific general laws. A belief is a statement that is not scientifically provable. Beliefs may or may not be wrong; They are just outside the realm of science to explore them.

Here are four reasons why philosophers examine what it means to be a law of nature: First, as noted above, laws seem to play at least a central role in scientific practice. Second, laws are important for many other philosophical issues. For example, philosophers, triggered by the presentation of the counterfactual narratives of Chisholm (1946, 1955) and Goodman (1947), as well as the deductive-nological explanatory model of Hempel and Oppenheim (1948), wondered what makes counterfactual and explanatory claims true, thought that laws matter, and thus also wondered what distinguishes laws from non-laws. Third, Goodman suggested that there is a link between legality and confirmation through inductive reasoning. Thus, some who sympathize with Goodman`s idea come to the problem of laws because of their interest in the problem of induction. Fourth, philosophers love good puzzles. Let us suppose that everyone is sitting here (cf. Langford 1941, 67). Then, trivially, that everyone is sitting here is true. While true, this generalization does not appear to be law.

It`s just too random. Einstein`s principle that no signal moves faster than light is also a true generalization, but on the other hand, it is thought to be a law; It`s not as random. What makes the difference? Another example of the influence of mathematics on scientific law is that of probability. «My favorite scientific law is that we live in a probabilistic, not deterministic, world. For large numbers, probability always works. The house always wins,» said Dr. Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. «We can calculate the probability of an event and determine our confidence from our estimate, but there is always a trade-off between accuracy and safety. This is called the confidence interval. For example, we can be 95% sure that what we`re trying to estimate is within a certain range, or we can be more sure, let`s say 99% sure, that it`s within a wider range. Just like in life in general, we have to accept that there is a compromise. For the most part, philosophers have thought that if scientists have discovered extraordinary laws that are laws, they have done so at the level of fundamental physics.

Some philosophers, however, doubt that even at this fundamental level there are laws without exception. For example, Cartwright argued that the descriptive and explanatory aspects of laws conflict with each other. «Presented as descriptions of facts, they are false; changed to be true, they lose their basic explanatory power» (1980, 75). Consider Newton`s principle of gravity, F = Gmm′/r2. Well understood, according to Cartwright, it is said that for any two bodies, the force between them is Gmm′/r2. But if this is what the law says, then the law is not an invariable regularity. This is because the force between two bodies is affected by properties other than their mass and the distance between them, by properties such as the charge of the two bodies as described by Coulomb`s law. The statement of the gravitational principle can be modified to make it true, but this, according to Cartwright, at least in some standard ways, would deprive it of its explanatory power. For example, if the principle that F = Gmm′/r2 holds only if there are no forces other than gravitational forces at work, then this would be true, but it would only apply under idealized circumstances. Lange (1993) uses another example to make a similar point. Consider a standard expression of the law of thermal expansion: «Whenever the temperature of a metal bar of length L0 changes by T, the length of the bar changes by L = kL0T», where k is a constant, the coefficient of thermal expansion of the metal. If this expression were used to express the strict generalization directly suggested by its grammar, then such a statement would be erroneous because the length of a measure does not change in the way it is described in cases where someone hammers the ends of the bar.

It seems that the law will require reservations, but so many that the only obvious way to account for all the necessary reservations would be something like a ceteris paribus clause. Then the worry becomes that the declaration would be empty. Because of the difficulty of giving plausible truth conditions for the ceteris paribus phrases, it is to be feared that «If all other things being equal, L = kL0T» could mean «L = kL0T assuming that L = kL0T». Two reasons may be given for believing that a law does not depend on a necessary connection between immovable property. The first reason is the ability to think that it is a law in one possible world that all F`s are G, although there is another world with an F that is not G. The second is that there are laws that can only be discovered a posteriori. If necessity is always linked to the laws of nature, then it is not clear why scientists cannot always cope with a priori methods. Of course, both of these reasons are often questioned. Maintainers argue that thinkability is not a guide to possibility.

They also refer to the arguments of Saul Kripke (1972), which seek to reveal certain a posteriori truths necessary to maintain that the a posteriori character of certain laws does not prevent their regularity from requiring a necessary link between properties. To further support their own view, the Needers argue that their position is a consequence of their preferred disposition theory, according to which provisions essentially have their causal powers.