Talk:Outline of science

The following prose was added to the outline, but was not in outline format ("outline" is short for "hierarchical outline", a form of list). I moved it here in case any of it can be used for annotations.

Hypothesis

This step is about taking the results of the observation and analysing them to find patterns or links to try to understand what happened in the observation. it then involves coming to an idea about what happened, and then going onto the next step. Example:

HYPOTHESIS: "I believe that the more sunlight a tomato plant receives, the larger the tomatoes will grow.

This hypothesis is based on: (1) Tomato plants need sunshine to make food through photosynthesis, and logically, more sun means more food, and; (2) Through informal, exploratory observations of plants in a garden, those with more sunlight appear to grow bigger.

Prediction

The hypothesis is your general statement of how the researcher thinks the scientific phenomenon in question works. this stage is when you refine it and think about how you can test it. it can be useful to see how others have tried in the past, looking up similar ideas in books or on the Internet. Once the prediction and hypothesis are developed, they should not be changed. this is and important part of the method.

Continuing our tomato plant example, a good prediction would be: Increasing the amount of sunlight tomato plants in my experiment receive should cause an increase in their size compared to identical plants that received the same care but less light, if my hypothesis is correct.

Experimentation

This is the stage where the hypothesis is tested to see if it is correct or not. you need to do multiple tests under different conditions, as well as multiple copies of each test to eliminate errors or anomalies.

Again, with the tomato plant example, a good experimentation stage would involve possibly going out into the garden and growing tomato plants in several different locations, with several different plants in each location in case one had more favorable results for some other reason than sunlight. the results of the experiment must be recorded. a good way to determine what to record is to check everything that is relevant so you can establish connections later.

• Experiment – methodical trial and error procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis.

Conclusion

The final step in the scientific method is the conclusion. This is a summary of the experiment's results, and how those results match up to your hypothesis. There can be two options at this stage. either you reject your hypothesis, possibly going back to the hypothesis step and begin again with another different hypothesis, or you can accept your hypothesis. This does NOT mean that the hypothesis is proved, but rather it means that it is supported by your set of results. what often follows, is that a researcher writes these results up and gives the 'papers' as they are sometimes known, to another researcher. Once many researchers have shown evidence to support a hypothesis or theory then it can be decided as proved, but this is often a difficult thing to decide. one definition says that the entire scientific community must agree that the results are in no way disputable: there is not possible way that there could be a situation in which the hypothesis doesn't apply. If any scientist has any reason to dispute a proven theory, he may to so by attempting to find results that show it and not correct in all circumstances. These claims are often hoaxes and as such the claim is often needed to be shown by getting many independent researchers to complete the same experiment to show it wrong.

Science is often misrepresented in the media.^[1]

The way the outline is currently written in the chemistry section, phytochemistry is the parent category to fields as diverse as chemical biology, chemical engineering, chemical oceanography, oenology, and spectroscopy. It almost seems as though phytochemistry accidentally split off part of the listing under physical chemistry, as several of the fields currently listed under phytochemistry could go under physical chemistry.

I propose the following changes, but if possible, I would like to get some discussion going before making them.

• Phytochemistry is moved under biochemistry
• Move the following areas to be categories directly under chemistry
  • Chemical oceanography, following the example of atmospheric chemistry (or perhaps both should be under environmental chemistry)
  • Polymer chemistry
  • Solid-state chemistry
  • Surface science
• Move the following areas currently under phytochemistry to physical chemistry
  • Chemical physics - or possibly remove as this is listed under physics
  • Mathematical chemistry
  • Mechanochemistry
  • Spectroscopy
• Remove the following areas from the chemistry outline
  • Chemical engineering - no other engineering disciplines are listed under a science category
  • Materials science - Wikipedia doesn't have separate articles on materials science and materials engineering and in practice, they're typically the same, so I think we should remove an engineering field from a science discipline for consistency. Also, I think it would be inaccurate to consider materials science a field of chemistry, as it does not rely more on chemistry than physics or its own formalism.
  • Nanotechnology - this seems like it should be listed as an applied science, or at least listed under other fields like physics and engineering as well
  • Statistical mechanics - this is a branch of physics. I am moving that there

I'm not sure what do with oenology. Could it go under agronomy in applied sciences?

Also, photochemistry seems like it should go under physical chemistry. Mred64 (talk) 04:21, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Just 2 quick notes, not a thorough reply:

1. See Outline of chemistry, and Outline of physical science for other lists that may help, or may also need correcting.

2. This edit was where the phytochemistry entry became a parent-topic. You may wish to ask that editor to comment - it looks like they were doing a lot of work on this outline, during a week in May 2012.

Hope that helps. –Quiddity (talk) 01:01, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

It appears that the parent entry that followed phytochemistry was accidentally erased, which inadvertently turned phytochemistry into a parent. I put the parent entry back.

Mred64, your proposed changes look good to me. Feel free to adjust the taxonomy as you see fit.

Oenology isn't a branch of horticulture, as it has nothing to do with cultivating (growing) plants. I've copied it to Food science, which is on the same branch as horticulture. But it looks like oenology is also a branch of chemistry: the chemistry of wine. Winemaking is a chemical process. The Transhumanist 17:29, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Ah, that parent category makes more sense. It looks like chemistry is the only science that has a category of "multidisciplinary fields involving X". It just strikes me as a bit odd to only have a classification like that for chemistry. A decent number of multidisciplinary fields are listed directly under the multiple relevant fields. Would it be worth putting a multidisciplinary science field directly under natural science? Although that seems like it could be a hassle to organize. I think oenology just seems really applied to put under chemistry, although we also flavor chemistry listed, so maybe that's not a big deal. Mred64 (talk) 00:11, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

• Portal:Technology

I've nominated Portal:Technology for featured candidacy. Comments would be appreciated, at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Technology. — Cirt (talk) 17:38, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

"Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline". There are two types of outlines: sentence outlines (like those you made in school to plan a paper), and topic outlines (like the topical synopses that professors hand out at the beginning of a college course). Outlines on Wikipedia are primarily topic outlines that serve 2 main purposes: they provide taxonomical classification of subjects showing what topics belong to a subject and how they are related to each other (via their placement in the tree structure), and as subject-based tables of contents linked to topics in the encyclopedia. The hierarchy is maintained through the use of heading levels and indented bullets. See Wikipedia:Outlines for a more in-depth explanation. The Transhumanist 00:09, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Two points to consider:

1) Other major divisions (natural, social, applied ) have been moved to separate outline pages. Shouldn't the same be done with formal science? Right now, the article seems very unbalanced in terms of the number of words on each topic.

2) Operations research appears in two places: once as a branch of systems science, and once as a branch of optimisation, which, in turn, is shown as a branch of applied mathematics. Two issues here: First, as far as the choice between applied mathematics and systems science, the first seems to me the more natural choice, but that may just reflect my own narrow perspective. In any case, it shouldn't be in both. Second , it seems very strange to call operations research a branch of optimisation. If anything, it's the other way around. But I think that optimisation is simply a description of what operations research does.

I'm tempted to just be bold and fix these things as I think they ought to be, but I'm going to hold off until some other views are heard from. This is not really my area of expertise, and an outline should reflect a consensus view. Davidhof (talk) 04:51, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Done.--Cswquz (talk) 10:13, 17 May 2019 (UTC)