ABC123the process of science

CHAPTER ONE 
What Is science?
What's the Point?
What should you be able to do after studying this section?
1. Define science.
2. List three characteristics that distinguish science from other ways of learning about the world 3. Identify topics that can be addressed by science as well as identify topics that can not be examined by science.
4. List two ways that scientists develop hypotheses.
5. Use inductive reasoning to form hypotheses and deductive reasoning to form predictions 
6. Conduct the first five steps in hypothesis testing.
INTRODUCTION 
One important purpose of this class is to teach you how to" do" " science. Thus, it might be useful to ask-what is science? Science is one of a number of different approaches to understanding the world around us Science is differentiated from other ways of learning about the world (e. g. , religion, philosophy, etc. because it uses the scientific method. I am confident that all of you can spout off the steps in the scientific method,but I am less confident that you actually understand what they mean (and in this course, understanding is going to be much more important than memorization) . In a nutshell, what separates science from other ways of leaming about the worid is that science uses observations and experimentation to test predictions of hypotheses about how the world works.
Science deals with the natural world. That is. scientists assume that the world can be understood based on natural phenomena. Scientists have observed that there appears to be regularities in the way that the world works that suggest that the world is governed bynatural laws. " Religion, on the other hand, explicitly deals with the supernatural world. Moreover, religion relies on faith or divine inspiration for truth rather than test-ing predictions of hypotheses with data. Thus, because of its very nature, science is incapable of answering