Modern science, being part of culture, is also not homogeneous. It is primarily subdivided into humanitarian and natural science branches, according to which the subject of their research lies in the field of social consciousness or social being. In our discipline, the main concepts developed by modern natural sciences will be considered.
Enatural sciences vary in degree of generality depending on the subject of their study. So, perhaps, mathematics, the science of relationships, has the greatest degree of generality today. Everything to which the concepts can be applied: more, less, equal, not equal, refers to the area of applicability of mathematics. Therefore, the use mathematical methods became an integral part of the methodology of the majority applied sciences.
Physics, the science of motion, has a huge degree of generality. Movement is a necessary attribute of matter. It permeates all aspects of social life and is reflected in public consciousness. Therefore, the developments created by physics turn out to be useful far beyond the traditional scope of their application.
Take, for example, the economy of a capitalist society. The movement of capital and goods plays a significant role in it. The product created by the manufacturer moves to the consumer, while its monetary equivalent makes the opposite movement.
Physics is well aware of such systems with a qualitative transformation of motion and the presence feedback between their elements. A typical example of such a system is, for example, an oscillatory circuit consisting of a capacitor, an inductor and a resistance (resistor) connected in series. Such systems are well described mathematical equations, which have two types of solutions: oscillatory, if the feedback level is high, and relaxation, if sufficient attenuation is introduced into the feedback circuit. This attenuation is determined by the amount of energy dissipated in the feedback loop.
Capitalism of the stage of primitive accumulation, described in detail by K. Marx in his famous work “Capital”, had a significant level of feedback, which should have led to oscillatory processes in the economy. Indeed, such capitalism was characterized by crises of overproduction. Because of the possibility of crises, capitalism was declared “decaying”.
The analysis of crises, produced mainly in the United States, led economists to the conclusion that an element of dispersion should be introduced into the chain of commodity-money movement.
You can disperse the goods. Such attempts were made in the United States during the so-called Great Depression. Wheat was drowned in Hudson Bay, oranges were burned in locomotive fireboxes. The destruction of material values, of course, reduces the scope of fluctuations in the commodity-money flow. However, in general, it is disadvantageous to society.
More successful was the dispersion of money. It is expressed as a balance of payments deficit. Simply put, the whole society begins to live in debt. As a result of this dispersion, the crises of overproduction in the modern capitalist economy have disappeared.
After the Arab oil countries entered the arena, which were not covered by the mechanism of dispersion of the commodity-money mass, the capitalist world was again in a fever. However, diplomatic efforts and international economic sanctions made it possible to bring the economies of these countries into general scheme payment deficit. After that, relative stability returned to the capitalist world.
Chemistry, the science of the structure of matter and its transformation, is next in terms of the degree of generality of the subject. It is served by physics and mathematics as auxiliary tools. Chemistry has a well-defined and very broad field of application.
The scope of biology is even more limited, but certainly no less important. This is the science of life. Her understanding requires deep knowledge in mathematics, physics, chemistry. To understand the full depth of the problems facing biology, think at your leisure about how the living differs from the non-living.
Chemistry and biology are remarkable in that they developed and developed the concept of classification. In addition to chemistry and biology, it is widely used in computational mathematics and is of undoubted interest to students of economics.
In addition to the listed fundamental natural sciences, there is a large number of applied sciences. For example, geology and geography are the sciences of the earth and its structure. Anatomy and physiology study the biological characteristics of a person. Today, the so-called frontier scientific disciplines are very popular. As they said before: "Disciplines emerging at the intersection of sciences." These are biophysics, biochemistry, physical chemistry, mathematical physics, etc. special role among them plays modern ecology - a science designed to solve the global environmental problem created by mankind literally in recent decades.
Back at the end of the last century, the Earth was mainly an agrarian planet with a relatively small number of cities and a low level of industrial production. Agriculture was practically non-waste. For example, go to a modern village (I don't mean holiday villages). There you usually will not find landfills. Items that are part of peasant use are almost completely and completely disposed of.
A completely different picture is observed in cities. Humanity has come to the point where it can be crushed by the waste of its own life, primarily household waste and waste from modern chemical and processing industries. common to the so-called developed countries the tendency to oust hazardous industries to underdeveloped countries (including Russia) does not save the situation. The solution can only be found by the united efforts of all mankind.
In the history of science until the 19th century, natural and humanitarian areas were not distinguished, and scientists until that time gave preference to natural science, that is, the study of those that exist objectively. In the 19th century, the division of sciences began at universities: the humanities, which are responsible for the study of cultural, social, spiritual, moral and other types of human activity, stand out in a separate area. And everything else falls under the concept of natural science, the name of which comes from the Latin "essence".
The history of the natural sciences began about three thousand years ago, but there were no separate disciplines then - philosophers were engaged in all areas of knowledge. Only at the time of the development of navigation did the division of sciences begin: astronomy also appeared, these areas were necessary during travel. With the development of technology, and stood out in independent sections.
The principle of philosophical naturalism is applied to the study of the natural sciences: this means that the laws of nature must be investigated without mixing them with the laws of man and excluding the action of the human will. Natural science has two main goals: the first is to explore and systematize data about the world, and the second is to use the knowledge gained for practical purposes to conquer nature.
Types of natural sciences
There are basic ones that have existed as independent areas for a long time. This is physics, chemistry, geography, astronomy, geology. But often the areas of their research intersect, forming at the junctions of new sciences - biochemistry, geophysics, geochemistry, astrophysics and others.
Physics is one of the most important natural sciences modern development began with Newton's classical theory of gravity. Faraday, Maxwell and Ohm continued the development of this science, and by the XX in the field of physics, when it became known that Newtonian mechanics is limited and imperfect.
Chemistry began to develop on the basis of alchemy, its modern history begins in 1661 with Boyle's The Skeptical Chemist. Biology appeared only in the 19th century, when the distinction between living and non-living matter was finally established. Geography was formed during the search for new lands and the development of navigation, and geology stood out as a separate area thanks to Leonardo da Vinci.
SUBJECT AND STRUCTURE OF NATURAL SCIENCE
The term "natural science" comes from a combination of the words of Latin origin "nature", that is, nature, and "knowledge". Thus, the literal interpretation of the term is knowledge about nature.
natural science in the modern sense - a science, which is a complex of sciences about nature, taken in their relationship. At the same time, nature is understood as everything that exists, the whole world in the variety of its forms.
Natural science - a complex of natural sciences
natural science in the modern sense - a set of sciences about nature, taken in their relationship.
However this definition does not fully reflect the essence of natural science, since nature acts as a single whole. This unity is not revealed by any particular science, nor by their entire sum. Many special natural science disciplines do not exhaust everything that we mean by nature with their content: nature is deeper and richer than all the existing theories.
The concept of " nature' is interpreted in different ways.
In the broadest sense, nature means everything that exists, the whole world in the variety of its forms. Nature in this sense is on a par with the concepts of matter, the universe.
The most common interpretation of the concept of "nature" as a set of natural conditions for the existence of human society. This interpretation characterizes the place and role of nature in the system of historically changing attitudes towards it of man and society.
In a narrower sense, nature is understood as the object of science, or rather, the total object of natural science.
Modern natural science is developing new approaches to understanding nature as a whole. This is expressed in ideas about the development of nature, about various forms of the movement of matter and different structural levels of the organization of nature, in an expanding idea of the types of causal relationships. For example, with the creation of the theory of relativity, views on the spatiotemporal organization of natural objects have significantly changed, the development of modern cosmology enriches ideas about the direction of natural processes, the progress of ecology has led to an understanding of the deep principles of the integrity of nature as unified system
At present, natural science is understood as exact natural science, that is, such knowledge about nature, which is based on a scientific experiment, is characterized by a developed theoretical form and mathematical design.
The development of special sciences requires a general knowledge of nature, a comprehensive understanding of its objects and phenomena. To obtain such general ideas, each historical epoch develops an appropriate natural-science picture of the world.
Structure modern natural science
Modern natural science is a branch of science based on the reproducible empirical testing of hypotheses and the creation of theories or empirical generalizations that describe natural phenomena.
Total object of natural science- nature.
The subject of natural science- facts and phenomena of nature that are perceived by our senses directly or indirectly, with the help of instruments.
The task of the scientist is to identify these facts, generalize them and create a theoretical model that includes the laws that govern natural phenomena. For example, the phenomenon of gravitation is a concrete fact established through experience; the law of universal gravitation is a variant of the explanation of this phenomenon. At the same time, empirical facts and generalizations, once established, retain their original meaning. Laws can be changed in the course of the development of science. Thus, the law of universal gravitation was corrected after the creation of the theory of relativity.
The basic principle of natural science is: knowledge of nature must beempirical verification. This means that the truth in science is that position, which is confirmed by reproducible experience. Thus, experience is the decisive argument for the adoption of a particular theory.
Modern natural science is a complex set of natural sciences. It includes such sciences as biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography, ecology, etc.
Natural Sciences differ in their subject matter. For example, the subject of biology is living organisms, chemistry - substances and their transformations. Astronomy studies celestial bodies, geography - a special (geographical) shell of the Earth, ecology - the relationship of organisms with each other and with the environment.
Each natural science is itself a complex of sciences that have arisen at different stages of the development of natural science. Thus, biology includes botany, zoology, microbiology, genetics, cytology, and other sciences. In this case, the subject of botany is plants, zoology - animals, microbiology - microorganisms. Genetics studies the laws of heredity and variability of organisms, cytology - a living cell.
Chemistry is also subdivided into a number of narrower sciences, for example: organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, analytical chemistry. To geographical sciences include geology, geography, geomorphology, climatology, physical geography.
The differentiation of sciences has led to the allocation of even smaller areas of scientific knowledge.
For example, the biological science of zoology includes ornithology, entomology, herpetology, ethology, ichthyology, etc. Ornithology is the study of birds, entomology is the study of insects, and herpetology is the study of reptiles. Ethology is the study of animal behavior; ichthyology is the study of fish.
The field of chemistry - organic chemistry is divided into polymer chemistry, petrochemistry and other sciences. The composition of inorganic chemistry includes, for example, the chemistry of metals, the chemistry of halogens, and coordination chemistry.
The current trend in the development of natural science is such that, simultaneously with the differentiation of scientific knowledge, opposite processes are going on - the combination of separate areas of knowledge, the creation of synthetic scientific disciplines. At the same time, it is important that the unification of scientific disciplines occurs both within different areas of natural science and between them. Thus, in chemical science, at the junction of organic chemistry with inorganic and biochemistry, the chemistry of organometallic compounds and bioorganic chemistry, respectively, arose. Examples of interscientific synthetic disciplines in natural science are such disciplines as physical chemistry, chemical physics, biochemistry, biophysics, physical and chemical biology.
However, the current stage in the development of natural science - integral natural science - is characterized not so much by the ongoing processes of synthesis of two or three related sciences, but by a large-scale unification of different disciplines and areas of scientific research, and the trend towards large-scale integration of scientific knowledge is steadily increasing.
In natural science, fundamental and applied sciences are distinguished. Fundamental sciences - physics, chemistry, astronomy - study the basic structures of the world, while applied sciences are engaged in applying the results of fundamental research to solve both cognitive and socio-practical problems. For example, metal physics, semiconductor physics are theoretical applied disciplines, and metal science, semiconductor technology are practical applied sciences.
Thus, the knowledge of the laws of nature and the construction of a picture of the world on this basis is the immediate, immediate goal of natural science. Promoting the practical use of these laws is the ultimate goal.
Natural science differs from the social and technical sciences in its subject matter, goals, and research methodology.
At the same time, natural science is considered as the standard of scientific objectivity, since this field of knowledge reveals generally valid truths accepted by all people. For example, another large complex of sciences - social science - has always been associated with group values and interests that both the scientist himself and the subject of research have. Therefore, in the methodology of social science, along with objective research methods, the experience of the event under study, the subjective attitude towards it, is of great importance.
Natural science also has significant methodological differences from the technical sciences, due to the fact that the goal of natural science is the knowledge of nature, and the goal of technical sciences is to solve problems. practical issues associated with the transformation of the world.
However, it is impossible to draw a clear line between the natural, social and technical sciences at the current level of their development, since there are whole line disciplines that occupy an intermediate position or are complex. So, at the junction of natural and social sciences economic geography is located, at the junction of natural and technical - bionics. An integrated discipline that includes natural, social, and technical sections is social ecology.
Thus, modern natural science is a vast developing complex of natural sciences, characterized by simultaneous processes of scientific differentiation and the creation of synthetic disciplines and oriented towards integration scientific knowledge.
Natural science is the basis for the formation scientific picture of the world.
Under scientific picture of the world understand a holistic system of ideas about the world, its general properties and regularities arising from the generalization of the main natural science theories.
The scientific picture of the world is in constant development. In the course of scientific revolutions, qualitative transformations are carried out in it, the old picture of the world is replaced by a new one. Each historical epoch forms its own scientific picture of the world.
System of natural science knowledge
natural science is one of the components of the system of modern scientific knowledge, which also includes complexes of technical and human sciences. Natural science is an evolving system of ordered information about the laws of motion of matter.
The objects of study of individual natural sciences, the totality of which as early as the beginning of the 20th century. bore the name of natural history, from the time of their inception to the present day they have been and remain: matter, life, man, Earth, the Universe. Accordingly, modern natural science groups the main natural sciences as follows:
- physics, chemistry, physical chemistry;
- biology, botany, zoology;
- anatomy, physiology, genetics (the doctrine of heredity);
- geology, mineralogy, paleontology, meteorology, physical geography;
- astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, astrochemistry.
Of course, only the main natural ones are listed here, in fact modern natural science is a complex and branched complex, including hundreds of scientific disciplines. Physics alone unites a whole family of sciences (mechanics, thermodynamics, optics, electrodynamics, etc.). As the volume of scientific knowledge grew, certain sections of sciences acquired the status of scientific disciplines with their own conceptual apparatus, specific research methods, which often makes them difficult to access for specialists involved in other sections of the same, say, physics.
Such differentiation in the natural sciences (as, indeed, in science in general) is a natural and inevitable consequence of ever narrower specialization.
However, also naturally in the development of science, counter processes take place, in particular, natural science disciplines are formed and formed, as they often say, “at the junctions” of sciences: chemical physics, biochemistry, biophysics, biogeochemistry, and many others. As a result, the boundaries that were once defined between individual scientific disciplines and their sections become very conditional, mobile and, one might say, transparent.
These processes, leading, on the one hand, to a further increase in the number of scientific disciplines, but, on the other hand, to their convergence and interpenetration, are one of the evidence of the integration of the natural sciences, which reflects the general trend in modern science.
It is here, perhaps, that it is appropriate to turn to such a scientific discipline, which certainly has a special place, as mathematics, which is a research tool and a universal language not only of the natural sciences, but also of many others - those in which quantitative patterns can be seen.
Depending on the methods underlying research, we can talk about the natural sciences:
- descriptive (exploring factual data and relationships between them);
- exact (building mathematical models for expressing established facts and relationships, i.e. patterns);
- applied (using the systematics and models of descriptive and exact natural sciences for the development and transformation of nature).
Nevertheless, a common generic feature of all sciences that study nature and technology is conscious activity. professional workers science aimed at describing, explaining and predicting the behavior of the objects under study and the nature of the phenomena being studied. The humanities are distinguished by the fact that the explanation and prediction of phenomena (events) is based, as a rule, not on an explanation, but on an understanding of reality.
This is the fundamental difference between sciences that have objects of study that allow for systematic observation, multiple experimental verification and reproducible experiments, and sciences that study essentially unique, non-repeating situations that, as a rule, do not allow exact repetition of an experiment, conducting more than once of some kind. or experiment.
Modern culture seeks to overcome the differentiation of cognition into many independent areas and disciplines, primarily the split between the natural and human sciences, which clearly emerged at the end of the 19th century. After all, the world is one in all its infinite diversity, therefore, relatively independent areas of a single system of human knowledge are organically interconnected; difference here is transient, unity is absolute.
Nowadays, the integration of natural science knowledge has clearly been outlined, which manifests itself in many forms and becomes the most pronounced trend in its development. Increasingly, this trend is also manifested in the interaction of the natural sciences with the humanities. Evidence of this is the promotion to the forefront modern science principles of consistency, self-organization and global evolutionism, opening up the possibility of combining a wide variety of scientific knowledge into an integral and consistent system, united general patterns evolution of objects of different nature.
There is every reason to believe that we are witnessing an ever-increasing convergence and mutual integration of the natural and human sciences. This is confirmed by the widespread use in humanitarian research not only of technical means and information technologies applied in the natural and technical sciences, but also general scientific research methods developed in the process of development of natural science.
The subject of this course are concepts related to the forms of existence and movement of living and inanimate matter, while the laws that determine the course social phenomena, are the subject of the humanities. However, it should be borne in mind that, no matter how different the natural and human sciences are, they have a generic unity, which is the logic of science. It is the submission to this logic that makes science a sphere human activity aimed at identifying and theoretical systematization of objective knowledge about reality.
The natural-scientific picture of the world is created and modified by scientists of different nationalities, among which are convinced atheists, and believers of various faiths and denominations. However, in its professional activity they all proceed from the fact that the world is material, that is, it exists objectively, regardless of the people who study it. Note, however, that the process of cognition itself can influence the studied objects of the material world and how a person imagines them, depending on the level of development of research tools. In addition, every scientist proceeds from the fact that the world is fundamentally cognizable.
Process scientific knowledge is a search for truth. However absolute truth in science is incomprehensible, and with each step along the path of knowledge it moves further and deeper. Thus, at each stage of cognition, scientists establish relative truth, realizing that at the next stage, more accurate knowledge, more adequate to reality, will be achieved. And this is another evidence that the process of cognition is objective and inexhaustible.
1. Natural sciences - concept and subject of study 3
2. History of the birth of natural science 3
3. Patterns and features of the development of natural science 6
4. Classification of natural sciences 7
5. Basic methods of natural science 9
Literature
Arutsev A.A., Ermolaev B.V., et al. Concepts of modern natural science. - M., 1999.
Matyukhin S.I., Frolenkov K.Yu. Concepts of modern natural science. - Orlov, 1999.
1. Natural sciences - the concept and subject of study
Natural science is the natural sciences or the totality of sciences about nature. On the present stage development of all sciences are divided into public or humanitarian, and natural.
The subject of study of the social sciences is human society and the laws of its development, as well as phenomena, one way or another connected with human activity.
The subject of study of the natural sciences is the Nature surrounding us, that is, various types of matter, the forms and laws of their movement, their connections. The system of natural sciences, taken in their mutual connection as a whole, forms the basis of one of the main areas of scientific knowledge about the World - natural science.
The immediate or immediate goal of natural science is knowledge of objective Truth , the search for the essence of the phenomena of Nature, the formulation of the basic laws of Nature, which makes it possible to foresee or create new phenomena. The ultimate goal of natural science is practical use of learned laws , forces and substances of Nature (production-applied side of knowledge).
Natural science, therefore, is the natural scientific foundation of the philosophical understanding of Nature and Man as part of this Nature, theoretical basis industry and Agriculture, technology and medicine.
2. History of the birth of natural science
The origins of modern science are the ancient Greeks. More ancient knowledge has come down to us only in the form of fragments. They are unsystematic, naive and alien to us in spirit. The Greeks were the first to invent proof. Neither in Egypt, nor in Mesopotamia, nor in China such a concept existed. Maybe because all these civilizations were based on tyranny and unconditional submission to authorities. In such circumstances, even the very idea of reasonable evidence seems seditious.
In Athens for the first time ever world history a republic emerged. Despite the fact that it flourished in the labor of slaves, in Ancient Greece conditions were created under which a free exchange of opinions became possible, and this led to an unprecedented flourishing of the sciences.
In the Middle Ages, the need for a rational knowledge of nature completely died out along with attempts to comprehend the destiny of man within the framework of various religious denominations. For almost ten centuries, religion has given exhaustive answers to all questions of life that were not subject to criticism or even discussion.
The writings of Euclid, the author of the geometry that is now studied in all schools, were translated into Latin language and became known in Europe only in the XII century. However, at that time they were perceived simply as a set of witty rules that had to be memorized - they were so alien to the spirit of medieval Europe, accustomed to believe, and not to seek the roots of Truth. But the volume of knowledge grew rapidly, and they could no longer be reconciled with the direction of thought of medieval minds.
The end of the Middle Ages is usually associated with the discovery of America in 1492. Some indicate an even more precise date: December 13, 1250, the day King Frederick II of Hohenstaufen died in the castle of Florentino near Lucera. Of course, one should not take such dates seriously, but several such dates taken together create an undoubted feeling of the authenticity of the turning point that occurred in the minds of people at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries. In history, this period is called the Renaissance. Obeying the internal laws of development and for no apparent reason, Europe in just two centuries revived the rudiments of ancient knowledge, which had been forgotten for more than ten centuries and later called scientific.
During the Renaissance in the minds of people there was a turn from the desire to realize their place in the world to attempts to understand its rational structure without reference to miracles and divine revelation. At first, the coup was aristocratic in nature, but the invention of printing spread it to all strata of society. The essence of the turning point is the liberation from the pressure of authorities and the transition from the medieval faith to the knowledge of modern times.
The Church resisted new trends in every possible way, she strictly judged philosophers who recognized that there are things that are true from the point of view of philosophy, but false from the point of view of faith. But the collapsed dam of faith could no longer be repaired, and the liberated spirit began to look for new ways for its development.
Already in the 13th century, the English philosopher Roger Bacon wrote: “There is a natural and imperfect experience that is not aware of its power and is not aware of its methods: it is used by artisans, not scientists ... Above all speculative knowledge and arts is the ability to produce experiments, and this science is the queen of sciences...
Philosophers must know that their science is powerless unless they apply powerful mathematics to it... It is impossible to distinguish sophism from proof without verifying the conclusion by experience and application.”
In 1440, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) wrote the book On Scientific Ignorance, in which he insisted that all knowledge about nature must be written down in numbers, and all experiments on it should be carried out with scales in hand.
However, the adoption of new views was slow. Arabic numerals, for example, came into general use already in the 10th century, but even in the 16th century, calculations were carried out everywhere not on paper, but with the help of special tokens, even less perfect than clerical accounts.
It is customary to begin the real history of natural science with Galileo and Newton. According to the same tradition, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is considered the founder of experimental physics, and Isaac Newton (1643-1727) the founder of theoretical physics. Of course, in their time (see historical reference) there was no such division of the single science of physics into two parts, there was not even physics itself - it was called natural philosophy. But such a division has a deep meaning: it helps to understand the features scientific method and, in essence, is equivalent to the division of science into experience and mathematics, which was formulated by Roger Bacon.