However, I did not agree that the bridge represented practice. Instead, the bridge represented reality and the act of seeing the bridge was practice, as is the act of reading the map. Even so, I do agree that the map represented theory. However, I then erroneously proposed that practice did not correct theory but on further thought I have now concluded that it does.

Now, getting from one city to another on Interstate 5 is practice. The map being the theory guides the practice of getting from one city to another. Of course, if one was to take the fastest route on the map, one is bound to take the interstate and arrive at the flooded portion. At this point, one would know that the theory is wrong in this case, which is not surprising since there is a contradiction to every generality. Since this is the case, a master's job is to resolve the contradiction by changing the map. Therefore, practice does correct theory.

This brings me to another point at which I could and should have added value. As Dr Gillette said, there is no one correct solution, but there is at least one best solution. He proceeded to say that his proposition was not one of relativism because there may be many possible solutions, but a lot of them will be wrong and nowhere close to being a best solution.

In principle, this would be wrong if the map was theory and the bridge was practice. The fact is that the bridge if flooded. Saying otherwise will not change the fact. This is the case in all other circumstances. However, the bridge is not practice. The bridge is the truth, or at least the situation of the flooded bridge is the truth. It is not relative. There is ONE truth. However, the practice is the overcoming of the obstacle of the flooded bridge, and there are many ways to do so. One could get a boat, a helicopter, take a detour, wait for the flood to subside, swim across, etc. Some methods are better than others depending on the situation, but the situation remains the same. Thus, a possible contradiction is resolved.

To define “Human Communication”, we shall take it apart and define its components, and to be inclusive and avoid any controversy, “human” here will be defined as any living thing of the species Homo sapiens. “Communications” will be defined as the sending and receiving of information. Putting the parts together, we shall define “human communications” as the transfer of information between Homo sapiens through the channels available to them.
Having defined the terms thus, it is only natural that humans can transfer information through senses of taste, smell, touch, sound, and sight. The permutations for possible participants in human communications can only logically be one-to-self, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one.

Now that we have determined what human communications is, we will move on to discuss why human communication occurs. The quick and simple answer would be “to transfer information”, but why transfer information? “Knowledge is power” has become cliché, but being cliché does not have bearing on a statement’s validity. In fact, validity is a main reason why clichés become clichés in the first place. It is true; it gets repeated; it is still true, but now it is cliché.

Money, also, is power. However, when money is spent, it is gone. Sure, the government can print more, but that will only decrease the real value of money in circulation. However, when information is communicated, it is not lost by the sender. Therefore, while the circulation of money is a zero sum game, the circulation of knowledge is not.
Another difference between knowledge and other commodities is that while fortunes can be inherited, knowledge dies with its owner unless communicated. Therefore, human communication occurs because it is advantageous to the species and sets it apart, on top of the food web in the course of Darwinist natural selection. As Srikant said, “human communication is unavoidable” (Devaraj).

As mentioned earlier, humans communicate through five different channels of taste, smell, touch, sound, sight, and a combination of these. For example, at a wedding or birthday, joy is communicated through good food. Good food appeals to the senses of taste, smell, and sight. Each sense reinforces the others. Another example could be a beggar asking for money. He/she would probably not be as successful if he/she did not look and smell bad but merely asked for money through the sound channel. As Littlejohn said “words have a function beyond mere transfer of information” (Littlejohn, 2004). That is where the other senses come in and play their part.

Since communication is vital to survival, humans naturally pick the most efficient channels through which to communicate. Taste being the slowest and shortest range is rarely used. Of course, on the rare occasions when it is used, it is often used to great effect.

Smell and touch have a longer range but are still rather slow in propagating. They are also very difficult to mast in situations that require it. For example, a scout doing recce can keep very quit and move in the shadows, but it is almost impossible for him/her to prevent communication of his/her position through his/her body odor and heat to the enemy.

Sight and sound are the fastest and longest ranged mediums of communication. Thus, they are the most often used. For a long time, the only medium through which one could communicate with the future was through drawing and writing. More recently, audio recording has made it possible to also communicate with the future through sound.
Even so, sight is still far more effective and frequently used than sound. Scientifically, light travels faster than sound, but practically, sound also provides the picture that paints a thousand words. Of course, a picture that paints a thousand words is outdated today when we have the television and internet that are capable of thousands of frame per second.

This brings us to the point of departure that truly makes human communication different from other living things. Humans are the only living things that are able to use technology to enhance the senses; hence increasing their information throughput.

While bats can hear much better than humans, they cannot beat a human with a stethoscope or an electric amplifier. While birds can see further, they cannot see around the earth like a human can with a monitor and a webcam on the other side of the earth. Whales transmit sound over long distances under water, but humans lay undersea optical cables that can transmit at the speed of light that far surpasses the speed of sound.

According to Griff, communication is so common that most people do not realize that they are communicating (Goas). In a way, human communication is like God. Everybody wants to use it but nobody wants to understand it.
The simplest form of human communication is one to oneself. The next simplest is one to one. This is explained by the Shannon-Weaver Model as encoding, sending over a medium where some noise might occur, and decoding. However, moving beyond two, chaos theory kicks in as three body systems are inherently non-deterministic. Thus management, especially techniques that thrive on chaos, according to Tom Peters, are required (Peters, 1987).

Besides the problem of chaotic systems, there is also the problem of information integrity. As Brian Jones pointed out in the Mensa Bulletin, “an informed citizenry is the cornerstone of democratic government. Without information, even a nation of hyper-logical Vulcans would be unable to make sound decisions,” or as any artillery person might say in short, “no comms [communications], no fire.” Misinformation is increasingly rampant in a knowledge economy as knowledge is not just power but money as well. Therefore, the ability to discern, not just decode and filter noise is highly important.

In summary, human communication is the transmitting and receiving of information by Homo sapiens. This very important skill is the one that allowed humans to progress thus far in a Darwinist world of natural selection. Humans communicate through their five senses. Although other living things are also able to do so, humans do much better because of the application of technology. However, human communication is not perfect as there are noise, inherent chaos, and misinformation.

EVEN SO, WE MUST STILL COMMUNICATE!

In conclusion, this paper is an example of human communication. It has an introduction, some motivation, the main points, a summary of the main points, and a conclusion. Most importantly, before concluding, it has a call to action because knowledge without action is pointless.
 
Works Cited
Devaraj, S. Personal correspondence.
Goas, G. Personal correspondence.
Littlejohn, S. (2004). Theories of Human Communication. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing.
Peters, T. (1987). Thriving on Chaos. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

The operation of rationalism was very well captured in the character of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle’s protagonist in his most famous detective series. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes said that “from a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.”

According to Wikipedia, rationalism is the belief that “all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be gained through the use of reason alone”. Now, as mentioned in my previous post on empiricism, the scientist’s job is to doubt everything. That was what Descartes did, being the Renaissance man that he was. (Descartes was a lawyer, philosopher, mathematician, and theologian.) Assuming nothing, what can we prove? “Cognito, ergo sum”, said Descartes: I think, therefore I am. Assuming nothing, I can prove at the very least that I exist simply because the one who is thinking (assuming is thinking) exists and I am the one thinking.

Of course, after that axiom, Descartes could not prove that anything else exists without assuming that God, or some supreme ”thinker”, also exists. Based on this assumption, Descartes developed formal empiricism and is widely accepted as the father of modern philosophy. He is also widely accepted as the father of modern mathematics and laid the foundations on which Newton, Lorentz, and Einstein would build their theories.

Descartes was a developer of geometry which is a very ancient art that relies purely on rationalism. Geometry was first formalized by Euclid based purely on axioms such as: a point is that which has no dimensions, and a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Descartes took it further. The Cartesian coordinate system uses the counterintuitive x, y, and z axes that are perpendicular to each other, rather than the bearing, azimuth, and distance away used by the polar coordinate system. Think about this: if you wanted to describe a location relative to you, would you say “5 yards in front, 3 yards to the left, and 4 yards up”, or would you just point (indicating both bearing and azimuth) and say how far away the location is from you? This is the main problem with rationalism. People who cannot handle abstract logic find it very difficult to accept, but those who do greatly appreciate the beauty of its mathematical elegance.

However, counterintuitive as it is, the Cartesian system greatly simplifies problems. Without describing coordinates as perpendicular axes, calculus would never have taken off as quickly as it did. Cartesian algebra and calculus is so simple that high school students can handle them with minimal effort while college students with concentrations in physics, mathematics, or computer science often have great difficulty applying polar algebra and calculus.

Moreover, while real experiments may produce variable results, thought experiments do not. For a long time, people such as Michelson and Morley tried to detect ether which they thought was the medium in which light propagated. They spent a lot of money on finding the best apparatus and a lot of time repeating the experiment to minimize random error, but they could only conclude within a certain standard deviation that they could not find the elusive “ether”. Not too long later, Einstein came along with an explanation that did not even require him to lift a finger in experimentation.

In the Einstein’s Mirror thought experiment, Einstein imagined that he was travelling in a train at the speed of light and looking in a mirror. He asked this question: would there be an image in the mirror since his face and the mirror was travelling at the same speed as light leaving his face? Essentially, if light was like sound, he would not because light would not be able to escape his face, yet it should. Thus, the theory of relativity was born and the laws of classical physics were overhauled without a single experiment.

In fact, later on, when the Rayleigh expedition proved conclusively that the theory of relativity was correct, Einstein was purported to have said that if it had proved otherwise, he “would be sorry for the good lord because the theory is correct”. Such is the confidence of rationalists on their approach, and rightly so. Unlike empirical knowledge, there is no standard deviation or confidence limit on knowledge derived logically from axioms. For any axiom A: if A then B; if B then C; therefore if A then C.

However, back to the problem that Descartes faced after proving that the “thinker” exists, faith is required to prove that anything else exists. I am very tempted to skip ahead and write on faith in the next post but the next two levels, priori and authority, also depend greatly on faith. Therefore, I will be writing on those in my next post.

Empiricism, as defined by Wikipedia, is “a theory of knowledge emphasizing the role of experience, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas.” The scientific method proposes that scientific enquiry should begin with a general survey of the field followed by the formation of a hypothesis based on trends in certain aspects in the field. The final step is the empirical investigation to falsify the null hypothesis and establish the theory as current scientific fact that is valid until another empirical experiment falsifies its hypothesis. Thus, an understanding of empirical methods, especially its shortcomings, is crucial to anybody who wishes to claim that he/she is a scientist, especially an information scientist. So, what exactly is empirical knowledge? The following example gives some insights.

Anderson University, where I got my undergraduate degree, is not famous, or probably even “good” for physics. It has no particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, or any other “cutting-edge” instruments worth boasting about on the departmental website. So while students at the big schools were crashing elementary particles into each other, physics students at Anderson were reproducing the “classics,” the experiments that were done by Michelson and Morley, Newton, and other people who lived more than a century ago.

As we all know, the master’s job is not to contradict. However, the scientist’s job is to doubt everything. Hence, I questioned the wisdom of reproducing the experiments that have already been repeated a million times by people all over the world for at least the last hundred years, and which produced results that have already made it into science textbooks as “fact.” Of course, my professor was able to resolve the perceived contradiction. According to him, empirical knowledge is NOT current knowledge that is derived from experiments but knowledge that is derived from current experiments.

Newton and company may have gotten the same results for more than three hundred years, but it takes just ONE contrary experiment to disprove their theories. This is the scientific method, and this is empirical knowledge. It is what makes the scientific method work. As the great American physicist Richard Feynman famously said “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.”

However, empiricism, especially pure empiricism, has its shortcomings. Is the moon still there when we stop looking at it? Does the clock actually move when we are not checking the time, or does it merely show the correct time when we do? When a tree falls in the middle of a forest so far from civilization that nobody observes it, does it make a sound? For the pure empiricist, we do not know for sure. We only know what we CURRENTLY observe. Previous experience counts for nothing because it takes only ONE valid contradiction to disprove the theory.

As Dr Groom often mentions in his research methodology class, case studies are only totally valid for the specific time, place, and people on which the case study is made. It cannot be applied to a “universe”. Therefore, while Feynman was absolutely right that observation is “what counts”, observation is limited to the time, place, and subjects that are observed. Observation does not tell us anything that can be reasonably extrapolated to other cases, which leads us to reasoning and rationalism which will be the topic of the next post in this series.

In the Human Communications class, we were told by Dr Gillette that the master’s job is not just to contradict but to resolve contradictions. Hence, I will begin with the contradiction and resolve it in at the end of this discussion.

In the Human Communications class, we were told by Dr Gillette that it was a class with student-centered learning, which meant that the professor was there to guide but the students should take charge. However, this is not the case with clapping. After a presentation by fellow students, presumably professional, in that class, there was no clapping. There was only expression of professional courtesy. On the other hand, when speakers, surely professional, are invited to present in the Problems in Information and Communications Sciences class, the class always claps after the presentation. So, is the Human Communications class really student-centered or is there only a semblance of it simply because the professor demands it?

Now, I am sure I can find thousands of sources about how clapping is a natural human response to entertainment if I tried, but I am not inclined to do so simply because there is no point in finding information from a second-hand source when I have firsthand experience. Now, we know that a professional presentation should be informational, and they often are, including the ones we have for both the ICS 601 and ICS 602 classes. So, why do we feel the urge to clap?

Approaching this from another angle, we know that monarchy is often tyranny, and democracy is purportedly not. Is it? Monarchy is tyranny because the king/queen makes the rules. In a democracy, the majority makes the rules, which means that it could also be a tyranny, the tyranny of the majority. Fortunately, it usually is not. While it must be the case that majority wins in a democracy, it does not imply that minorities have to lose. Unlike what Dr Steele says about second place being losers, I believe that minorities can and should come in second, third, fourth, and so on according to their percentage representation in the population. Basically, minorities can have as many rights and privileges as they want as long as they do not infringe on the rights and privileges of the majority. Are they, therefore, second-class citizens? Maybe. Are they losers? Not necessarily.

Similarly, just as democracy has room for “second-class citizens”, so professional presentations also have room for entertainment. Having established that, I shall now offer my resolution. If the presentation was professional and informative, it is only right that professional courtesies be expressed, and if the presentation happens to be entertaining as well, clapping should be allowed after professional courtesies are expressed, preferably led by the person expressing it.

P.S. As my team is presenting, I will not be able to put my words into action this week, but I will definitely do it in the following week should the situation call for such a response.

Putting the two together, “human communication” naturally means communication by humans which is the transmission and reception of information between Homo sapiens. Biologically, humans are able to detect signals from their environment via five ways: tasting, smelling, touching, seeing, and hearing. Hence, any information communicated will have to be through these channels.

To illustrate the use of the various channels, we will use the example of communicating love. Once could express love for another by cooking or baking something edible and palatable to the other’s sense of taste. One could also express love by wearing sweet smelling perfume that appeals to the other’s sense of smell. Love is often conveyed through pleasurable touches between humans such as hugging or kissing. Communicating love through sight could take the form of dressing up for a meeting and through sound could simply be saying “I love you.” Thus, all five channels can be used to communicate love and can also be used for other pieces of information as well.

Although the example mentioned above was about communication from one human to another, human communication is not restricted to just that. It also includes communication from a human to himself/herself, a single human to a group of humans, a group of humans to a single human, or between different groups of humans.

Therefore, human communication is the transmission of information between Homo sapiens through the five senses available to them which is not exclusive to one-to-one interactions but can be between groups of various sizes as well.

This event looked fine on the surface, but it was not. The investigations into the scandal was triggered by a phone tab on Juventus director, Luciano Moggi, which was released by Telecom Italia. Telecom Italia was then owned by the owner of Pirelli, a tire maker, which was a major sponsor of Inter Milan. Thus, besides invasion of privacy, this was also a case of conflict of interest. The supplier of the implicating information had a vested interest in the biggest benefactories of the scandal. Later evidence presented in court indicated that Inter Milan might actually have been involved in the match fixing as well but none of the evidence provided by Telecom Italia indicated that Inter Milan had anything to do with it.

While the communications industry has often been accused of spreading political and other forms of propaganda, this incident highlights another power that they have over society, the power to tap into information transmitted over the cables or bandwidths that they control. In this case, it was "only" sports, "only" a game. However, it does not have to stop at sports. It can also be used by various government agencies to spy on citizens. These agencies, can simply demand secret tapping into networks controlled by any given company. Of course, in the same vein, terrorist groups and other undesirable organizations may also be able to use a combination of threats and blackmail to demand the same. The world is becoming a very dangerous place to live in indeed.

Two points can have only one straight line between them, but three points can have three. Increasing this to four points gives a maximum of six possible straight lines between them. Increasing the number of points results in a further accelerated increase in the number of possible lines between them, and then we have something that looks kind of like a web.

Nevertheless, we do not need to go beyond three in this introduction. Isaac Newton had proposed that it was impossible to completely solve a three body problem, but Henri Poincare found certain three body configurations that were at least stable even if they were unpredictable. This was the basis of chaos theory which extrapolates the three body problem to many more points than three. Eventually, chaos theory proved to be a very successful way of describing our world. In fact, Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize winning work was on Brownian motion which explains chaos at the atomic level. (It was NOT for relativity.)

Towards the end of the Cold War, there arose a double edged situation. The iron curtain was crumbling and the world was starting to shrink. People’s lifespans increased as did birthrates. This brought an increased necessity for interaction between points, and a solution was sought and found. It was Web 1.0.

Web 1.0 was an attempt to bring structure to the chaos that is the Web. It was survived initially simply because less points meant less lines which meant less chaos. However, it soon grew totally out of control as people got all kinds of wrong ideas about how to tame this monster they have created. Eventually the bubble burst.

Web 2.0, on the other hand, is a very different approach. Unlike the comparatively structured Web 1.0 applications, Web 2.0 thrives on chaos. The more chaos the better. Wikipedia has open editing of almost all articles on it. Google offers free information very quickly. Mapquest produce maps based on user requests and give detailed directions between places. The Weather Channel’s webpage gives updated weather hourly. Mozilla Firefox is free to use, and being open source, has various addons that enhance the web browser.

Web 1.0 tried to control the chaos, including the people in it, and failed. Web 2.0 does not even try. It becomes part of the chaos and thrives because, according to the second law of thermodynamics, over time, the entropy (chaos) in a given system can only increase. Passage of time is tied to increase in chaos. Resistance to chaos is as futile as stopping time.

Therefore, my benchmark for Web 2.0 is its adaptation to chaos.

Now, we know that pottery, painting, sculpture, playwriting, prose, poetry, etc are arts, and biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, etc are sciences. What about architecture? What about linguistics? What about communication? In the first place, how do we decide that certain subjects are arts and others are sciences?
My undergraduate degree is Bachelor of Arts with majors in computer science/math and physics. Is Anderson University implying that physics, computer SCIENCE, and mathematics are arts? How dare they? Does that make sense?

To get a clearer understanding of degree names in this foreign country, I made a quick survey of various schools and found that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and UC Berkeley award Bachelor of Arts for all fields except engineering. This confirmed that Anderson was not the only weird school around. In fact, Indiana University is even weirder, awarding Bachelor of Arts for all fields except fine arts, which awards Bachelor of Fine Arts, and business, which awards Bachelor of Science. However, Ball State trumps them all with an array of eight different baccalaureate degrees, of which many overlap on various fields. Obviously, it also trumped my extremely limited understanding of American higher education.

So, because the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has not been written yet, I had to refer to the next best thing, Wikipedia. The entry on “Academic Degree” was haphazardly put together but it shed enough light on this crazy academic world. The answer is rather simple in the light of history. The award of the bachelor's degree dates back to way before the Renaissance, and obviously, there was no such thing as science then. Of course, there was no engineering either. Hence, it made sense that the the liberal arts were arts and were appropriately classified as arts when degrees were awarded. The industrial revolution that came after the Renaissance led to the development of the engineering field and since there was not Bachelor of Arts degree traditionally associated with it, it was, also appropriately, classified as a Bachelor of Science degree. As for the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, I guess the ancients did not consider the fine arts to be very academic.

Therefore, science seems to be a subset of art, and one might be tempted to conclude that the sciences are the arts that employ the scientific method, but is this true? The natural and social sciences use the scientific method extensively so we know that at least one half of the argument is true. However, many of the fine arts also use the scientific method. Painters would naturally study works of other painters and make generalizations on color schemes and such. Based on these, they will hypothesize on the elements that go together and the ones that do not. They will then put their ideas to the test and actually paint the picture. Their hypotheses can be easily falsified. If the painting sells, it might be the color scheme that works, and if it does not, then the theory is wrong.

Therefore, I must conclude that the difference between art and science is very much less distinct than most people assume.

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Please feel free to comment. I'm not sure how to do it and maybe it's disabled. If it is I would appreciate if someone could tell me how to enable it.

In science, controls are used to determine the true properties of a subject of study. For example, acceleration due to gravity of a smaller mass is found to be constant at a given displacement from the center of mass of the bigger mass. This is only true in the absence of air resistance.

Therefore, to determine the true acceleration due to gravity, an object has to be dropped in the absence of air and have its initial and final velocities measured. However, since nature abhors a vacuum, this fact could not be established until scientists managed to develop ways of controlling the environment at which the experiment is set up, and hence, people since time immemorial believed that the acceleration of light objects due to gravity is less than the acceleration of heavy objects because a feather falls slower than a stone.

Similarly, controls have to be used when analyzing a personality trait. Some traits are obviously considered desirable, and others not. For example, being smart, pretty, rich, famous, kind and gentle are considered good traits, and being dumb, ugly, poor, obscure, evil and rough are considered bad traits.

However, it is difficult to describe or define a trait because some other trait might be present and one might associate the trait with the other. For example, because some educated people are smart, most might be tempted to equate intelligence with education, but being educated and being smart are two separate traits.

As the saying goes, “It never rains, but it pours". How true when applied to humans. People don’t generally have some good traits and some bad traits. In general, most people have many bad traits, and a small minority, often called "the elite" have numerous good ones.

Hence, a person well endowed with intelligence is also likely to be well endowed with common sense, “EQ" (whatever that might mean), good looks, good luck, courage, adaptability, charm and possibly also good leadership. Such people stand head and shoulders above the crowd, otherwise known as the herd. Therefore, when historians choose good leaders to study, they are more than likely to pick out the most obvious, "the elite".

Alexander the Great, Napoleon, William Wallace, Genghis Khan, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were obviously very good leaders. However, they were also military or political geniuses. They also had many, if not all, of the above-mentioned traits. Therefore, they make poor examples for those interested in studying and defining leadership. Hence, we look to Custer.

Custer was obviously not very smart in choosing to fight a losing battle despite the numerous alternatives. In fact, he was dumb not to retreat when he was losing. This also shows his lack of common sense and inability to adapt. However, in spite of his lack of common sense, Custer had great leadership.

Of course, a leader does not even have to be brave like Custer. That Ivan the Terrible marched his elite troops into the sea to drown is obviously also good leadership. This brings me to my point of what a leader is.

A leader is one whom others follow when he leads, regardless of the soundness of his decisions.

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I initially wrote this entry for a friend's blog, and it is also on my facebook notes, but I'm not sure how to do the trackback thing so I'm researching it and will do so as soon as I find out how to do it.

Going further back in time, about two thousand years back, we find the real root of modern western art and science in Greece. Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Aristotle, and many others advanced various fields of art and science, yet the term science had not yet been invented. They were not scientists, neither were they artists. They were philosophers. Unlike the Renaissance man, the philosophers were not after knowledge and information but wisdom and the truth. They were obviously not scientists because the word “science” is derived from Latin which came long after the time of the great philosophers of Greece.

So, perhaps the Renaissance really marked the beginning of science. What then is science? To define it using a dictionary would be a grave injustice to this discussion so examples of sciences will be examined instead to see trends across all of them that may indicate what science might be. Now, there are two categories of sciences, natural sciences which are real sciences, and social sciences which I shall let the reader decide for himself/herself.

In any case, the social sciences study human behavior and boil down to the two fields of sociology, the behavior of people in groups and psychology which deals with behaviors of individual people. Of course, groups are made of individuals, and so, in fact, everything in the social sciences trace their fundamentals to psychology.

Psychology obviously originated from neurology which is a branch of biology and the discussion has now naturally moved to the natural sciences. All living things are made of chemicals and so biology is based on chemistry. Chemicals are made of atoms or molecules that are governed by the physical laws of electromagnetism. Subatomic particles are governed by quantum theory and so everything essentially finds its roots in physics. Ernest Rutherford sums it up simply (as all good physicists do): “All science is either physics or stamp collecting”, which begs the question: What is physics? Isaac Newton is widely regarded as the father of physics, and according to Newton, physics is “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

This explanation brings us back to the Greeks as Newton chose to associate his results with the ancient field of philosophy rather than the more recently developed science. It is a rather satisfying explanation that ties up most of the loose ends except that it omits an extremely important aspect of modern science. This missing piece is what defines modern science and differentiates it from classical philosophy: the scientific method. Hence, this explanation would probably be very disturbing to the typical modern scientist.

In order not to run out of things to write in the other entry on the Renaissance, I shall stop here and elaborate on the scientific method in the next post. In conclusion to this part, I believe that the Renaissance was a rebirth that resulted science, a creature quite different from the original.