1. The Nature of Science

2. Science asks three basic question:
What’s there?
How does it work?
How did it come to be this way?

3. Principle of Science Seeks to explain the natural world.
Assumes that this is possible by gathering evidence about it.

4. Science is a Process
Ideas are developed through reasoning and experiments.
Scientific claims are based on testing explanations against observations of the natural world and rejecting the ones that fail the test.
Subject to peer review and replication.

5. Scientific conclusions are well supported by facts and are tentative only in the sense that all ideas are open to scrutiny
Science is not democratic: ideas are accepted/rejected
based on evidence not what people think
Science is non-dogmatic. In science things are not accepted on faith but on evidence.
Science cannot make moral or aesthetic decisions.

6. Science corrects itself.

7. Theories are central to scientific thinking:
Theory
Popular meaning: a guess
In science: a well-substantiated explanation of events observed in the natural world

8. Fact Law A natural phenomenon repeatedly confirmed by observation.
A description of how a natural phenomenon will occur under certain circumstances.