Saturday, September 5, 2015

Evaluation of Scholarly Sources

In this post I will be focusing on two scholarly articles related to the controversy that arose from the question of if physics is falsifiable nowadays.  I will be answering questions related to the sources being scholarly articles.
RI, "Cover of the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first journal in the world exclusively devoted to science"  created 31 December 1664. public domain.

Scientific method: Defend the Integrity of Physics

  • What is its purpose?  The purpose of this article is to persuade the reader that physics can not be justified strictly though a mathematical approach.                                                                      
  • How and where was it published? This article was published in Nature which is a scientific journal based in the UK and was also put on Nature.com.                                                                 
  • What kinds of sources does it cite? This article cites sources from various journals along with texts pertaining to the field of string theory and cosmic inflation theory.  All of these citations are from reliable publishers and scientific journals.                                                                          
  • Who is the author? The authors of this article are George Ellis and Joe Silk. George Ellis is a professor in mathematics in Cape Town, South Africa while Joe Silk is a professor in astronomy at John Hopkins University and Gresham College.                                                       
  • Who is the intended audience?  The intended audience of this article is the scientific community, specifically the physics community.                                                                                     
  • How did I find it?  I found this article when I was completing a previous blog post as a referenced article that talks about the debate from the side of the attacks on science.  I then clicked on one of the links provided in a non-scholarly article and came upon this article.

Falsifiability of Scientific Theories

  • What is its purpose? The purpose of this article is to persuade future scientists to not abandon a theory immediately if there is a piece of evidence that contradicts the theory, instead leave the theory that is able to explain so much about things even if there is an observation or two that do not agree with the theory.                                                                                                                         
  • How and where was it published? This was published in the journal titled Mind.  It only ever appeared in text form.                                                                                                                        
  • What kinds of sources does it cite?  This article cites sources from previous books that produce some form of scientific theory as well as accounts of people that were the producers of these theories.                                                                                                                                       
  • Who is the author?  The author of this article is Richard Swinburne, who is Emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford University.  While he is a philosopher-and not a physicist-philosophy and science actually play off of each other and there for have a relation to one another about the way science should be conducted.                                                                       
  •  Who is the intended audience? The intended audience of this piece is future scientist who have the possibility of scrapping a theory because they produce one observation that contradicts the theory or along similar lines.                                                                                           
  • How did I find it?  I found this article by taking keywords from the previous scholarly article and putting them into JSTOR.  My key phrases were "scientific method", "integrity of science" and "falsifiability".  I found an article that referenced this article and after reading both found this one to be a closer fit to my controversy.

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