先谢谢大家了！
这是prompt How useful are the terms and/or models by which we know the universe? For instance, what good is it for us to speak in terms of “planets,” or of the “big bang,” or of the origins of the universe? What are some implications of such terms, models or ideas? Do they aid in our understanding, or oversimplify things? Engage sustained, specific examples from course material to make your argument.
The Tool of Science
In such a vast world as the universe we live in nowadays, many thing are out of our short reach. Through discovery, humanity has found that the universe has been expanding, and by that discovery, I would presume the result that there might be less then none possibility for humanity to know the whole universe. Because it is hard to understand the universe as a whole, humanity created terms to classified and model to study about the universe, trying every possible way in order to make the universe make more sense. However, are these classifications that human invented in fact useful? My answer to that is yes.
When most of us were young, we learned about the “big bang,” we learned about the sphere which we lived on is called “earth,” we learned that universe has “solar system” that contains sphere collection of rock and many other elements, which revolves around the “sun,” that they are called “planet.” However, what we learned may not have been the same as what people before us have learned. In Professor Wil Van Breugel’s lecture “Mask of Universe: Cosmologies since the beginning of time,” professor Breugel show the student how our view of world have changed from a deity-based magic century, to the remote God of mythic century, to nowadays where human discovered themselves were never to be the center of the universe, the Science century. From all these time, humanity changed over and over—big bang theory only happened in science century, the magic century believed the world to be made by all kinds of deities on the world, the mythic century say that a single God created everything. In reality, the universe itself has not changed much. It is the knowledge that increases in coordinates with time, definition and perspective that transformed as people moved on to a new generation. Thus, no matter how humanity changes, the planet is still a planet itself, Pluto will still be a sphere that revolves around the sun just like earth does, either with or without the fact that we consider it to be a planet or not (Core discussion). If we look at the universe this way, there is no point whatsoever in giving terms, definition or trying to find a model for the universe.
However, scientists are like children, full with curiosity, even if there is always knowledge to learn, as described by Descarte (Hothem). As there is countless knowledge to learn, too much that without the help of some “tool,” scientist might not be able to possibly figure out a single aspect of the wide universe. Classification is one of the tools that scientist use to organize subjects: Plants, animals, types of organism, kinds of bacteria, etc. Classification helped scientist name the object of study, giving them a “guidance” to follow. Although sometime guidance is only meant to be of help, not to be fully rely on, where as people usually would have a hard time understanding this idea, scientist also do sometime. As scientists rely on classification to understand how to connect things that are completely different together, they overuse and create classifications that are awfully absurd. Some classification in the old time became bias and racist, like Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, where Linnaeus describe the human race by skin color and (his ideas of) characteristics (Hothem).
Moreover, “laws of nature are not perfect for the laws of man,” (Viney) the concept of evolution pose a challenge to classification since organisms are not set in form as time moves on (Hothem). But challenge creates a force to change and shift, science also “evolve” with time, so is classification being improve as scientists learn more about the universe. By the recent days, classification has become a lead for us to understand the world we live in, each organism, and every inch of the land.
于是还在写当中……作者: 闪光 时间: 2012-3-1 14:58
什么文章？什么方面的？作者: 夢龙~里库欧思 时间: 2012-3-1 15:00 标题: 回 1楼(闪光) 的帖子 有点难说
“How useful are the terms and/or models by which we know the universe? For instance, what good is it for us to speak in terms of “planets,” or of the “big bang,” or of the origins of the universe? What are some implications of such terms, models or ideas? Do they aid in our understanding, or oversimplify things? Engage sustained, specific examples from course material to make your argument. ”
这是我们的prompt作者: lizhi2_03 时间: 2012-3-1 15:25
这是啥……作业么……
sorry,I'm afraid of nothing to help you [s:133]作者: 雾雨龙小紫 时间: 2012-3-1 22:50
对不起了梦龙，小紫看不懂啊，爱莫能助啊……作者: 夢龙~里库欧思 时间: 2012-3-2 01:23
呵哈
没关系的拉，总是说是碰碰运气的嘛~