Dec 20, 2010 0
lots to know
There’s a lot to know before you can get a general picture of reasonably scientific reality. You have to understand various scientific laws from several directions. You have to at least understand the scientific method and enough math to be able to approximate calculus. You have to understand to laws of force and motion, the laws of light and electricity, the laws of temperature and heat, and the laws of logic and information. On top of that, having an understanding of biology, psychology, sociology, history, and economics (even philosophy) would be useful as well.
That’s why it is so difficult to give reasoned answers to complex questions. It takes a multi-disciplinary approach to understand how various causes and effects relate to each other.
This is also why I am surprised at the makeup of various corporate and governmental organizations where I am pretty sure that most of the decision makers don’t have a very strong “scientific intuition”. Even in those areas that do use quantitative analysis, I wonder if there aren’t supporting research providing a historical, qualitative, or other such critical analysis.
Understanding reality in a more scientific way requires that you stand on the shoulders of herd of giants. Below is an organized list of scientific “giants” that I managed to learn something from:
▼ Basic Science – Herd of Giants
▼ Motion, Force and Flow
• Newton, (Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, etc).
• Bernoulli, et al.
▼ Light and Electricity
• Maxwell, (Faraday, Lenz, Henry, etc.)
• Einstein, (Bohr, Fermi, etc.)
▼ Heat and Temperature
• Carnot, Boltzmann, Gibbs, et al.
▼ Biology
• Mendel, et al.
• Darwin, et al.
• Pasteur, et al.
▼ Psychology
• Skinner, et al.
• Freud, Jaynes, et al.
• Jung, et al.
• Maslow, et al.
▼ Economics
• Bachelier, Samuelson, Smith, Marx, Keynes, Nash, Simon, etc.
• Von Neumann and Morgenstern, et al.
▼ Informatics, Systems, and Design
• Boole, Gödel, et al.
• Shannon, et al.
• Ashby, et al.
• C. Alexander, et al.
