1 natural sciences. Natural sciences are the most important source and method of obtaining knowledge about the world around us

Modern science, being part of culture, is also not homogeneous. It is primarily subdivided into humanitarian and natural science branches, accordingly, in the field of social consciousness or social being, the subject of their study lies. In our discipline, the basic concepts developed by modern natural sciences will be considered.

Enatural sciences differ in the degree of generality depending on the subject of their study... So, perhaps, the greatest degree of generality today has mathematics - the science of ratios. Everything to which the concepts can be applied: more, less, equal, not equal, belongs to the field of applicability of mathematics. Therefore, the use of mathematical methods has become an integral part of the methodology of most applied sciences.

Physics, the science of motion, has an enormous degree of generality. Movement is a necessary attribute of matter. It permeates all aspects of social life and is reflected in public consciousness. Therefore, developments created by physics turn out to be useful far beyond the traditional field of their application.

Take, for example, the economy of a capitalist society. The most significant role in it is played by the movement of capital and goods. The product created by the manufacturer moves to the consumer, while its monetary equivalent moves backward.

Physics is well aware of such systems with a qualitative transformation of motion and the presence of feedback between their elements. A typical example of such a system is, for example, an oscillatory circuit consisting of a capacitor, an inductor and a resistance (resistor) connected in series. Such systems are well described mathematical equations which have two types of solutions: oscillatory, if the feedback level is high and relaxation, if sufficient attenuation is introduced into the feedback loop. This attenuation is determined by the amount of energy dissipated in the feedback loop.

Capitalism of the stage of initial accumulation, described in detail by K. Marx in his famous work "Capital", had a significant level of feedback, which should have led to oscillatory processes in the economy. Indeed, such capitalism was characterized by crises of overproduction. Because of the possibility of crises, capitalism was declared “decaying”.

Analyzes of crises, mainly in the United States, have led economists to conclude that an element of dispersal should be introduced into the chain of commodity-money movement.

You can scatter the goods. Such attempts were made in the United States during the so-called Great Depression. Wheat was drowned in Hudson Bay, oranges were burned in locomotive furnaces. The destruction of material assets, of course, reduces the range of fluctuations in the commodity-money flow. However, in general, it is not beneficial to society.

The scattering of money turned out to be more successful. It is expressed as a balance of payments deficit. Simply put, the whole society begins to live in debt. As a result of this dispersal, the overproduction crises in the modern capitalist economy have disappeared.

After the oil Arab countries entered the arena, which were not covered by the mechanism of dispersal of the commodity-money supply, the capitalist world was again in a fever. However, diplomatic efforts and international economic sanctions made it possible to bring the economies of these countries into general scheme payment deficit. After that, comparative stability reappeared in the capitalist world.

The next most common subject is chemistry - the science of the structure of matter and its transformation. It is served by physics and mathematics as auxiliary tools. Chemistry has a well-defined and very broad field of application.

The field of application of biology is even more limited, but, of course, by no means less important. This is the science of living things. Its understanding requires deep knowledge in the field of mathematics, physics, chemistry. To realize the full depth of the problems facing biology, think at your leisure about how living things differ from non-living things.

Chemistry and biology are remarkable in that they have developed and developed the concept of classification. In addition to chemistry and biology, it is widely used in computational mathematics and is of undoubted interest for students of economics.

In addition to the listed fundamental natural sciences, there are also a large number of applied sciences. For example, geology and geography are the sciences of the Earth and its structure. Anatomy and physiology study the biological characteristics of a person. Today, the so-called frontier scientific disciplines are very popular. As they said before: "Disciplines arising at the intersection of sciences." These are biophysics, biochemistry, physical chemistry, mathematical physics, etc. A special role among them is played by modern ecology - a science designed to solve the global environmental problem created by mankind literally in the last decades.

At the end of the last century, the Earth was mainly an agricultural planet with a relatively small number of cities and low level industrial production. Agriculture was practically waste-free. For example, go to a modern village (I do not mean holiday villages). As a rule, you will not find landfills there. Items that are part of the peasant use are almost completely and completely disposed of.

A completely different picture is observed in cities. Humanity has approached the line from which it can be crushed by the waste of its own life, primarily household waste and waste of modern chemical and processing industries. The tendency common for the so-called developed countries to displace harmful industries to underdeveloped countries (including Russia) does not save the situation. The solution can only be found by the united efforts of all mankind.

System of natural science knowledge

Natural science is one of the components of the system of modern scientific knowledge, which also includes complexes of technical and humanitarian sciences. Natural science is an evolving system of ordered information about the laws of motion of matter.

The objects of study of individual natural sciences, the totality of which at the beginning of the XX century. was called natural history, from the time of their inception to the present day there have been and remain: matter, life, man, the Earth, the Universe. Accordingly, modern natural science groups the basic natural sciences as follows:

  • physics, chemistry, physical chemistry;
  • biology, botany, zoology;
  • anatomy, physiology, genetics (the doctrine of heredity);
  • geology, mineralogy, paleontology, meteorology, physical geography;
  • astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, astrochemistry.

Of course, only the main natural ones are listed here, in fact modern natural science is a complex and ramified complex that includes hundreds of scientific disciplines. Physics alone unites a whole family of sciences (mechanics, thermodynamics, optics, electrodynamics, etc.). As the volume of scientific knowledge grew, individual sections of science acquired the status of scientific disciplines with their own conceptual apparatus, specific research methods, which often makes them difficult for specialists dealing with other sections of the same, say, physics.

Such differentiation in the natural sciences (as, incidentally, in science in general) is a natural and inevitable consequence of an increasingly narrowing specialization.

At the same time, counter processes also occur naturally in the development of science, in particular, natural science disciplines are formed and formed, as they often say, "at the junctions" of sciences: chemical physics, biochemistry, biophysics, biogeochemistry and many others. As a result, the boundaries that were once defined between individual scientific disciplines and their divisions become very conditional, mobile and, one might say, transparent.

These processes, leading, on the one hand, to a further increase in the number of scientific disciplines, but on the other, to their convergence and interpenetration, are one of the evidences of the integration of natural sciences, reflecting the general trend in modern science.

It is here, perhaps, appropriate to turn to such a scientific discipline, which undoubtedly occupies a special place, as mathematics, which is a research tool and a universal language not only of the natural sciences, but also of many others - those in which quantitative laws can be seen.

Depending on the methods underlying the research, we can talk about the natural sciences:

  • descriptive (exploring the evidence and the links between them);
  • accurate (building mathematical models to express established facts and relationships, i.e. regularities);
  • applied (using the systematics and models of descriptive and exact natural sciences for the development and transformation of nature).

Nevertheless, a common generic feature of all sciences studying nature and technology is the conscious activity of professional workers in science, aimed at describing, explaining and predicting the behavior of the objects under study and the nature of the phenomena being studied. The humanities differ in that the explanation and prediction of phenomena (events) is based, as a rule, not on explanation, but on an understanding of reality.

This is the fundamental difference between the sciences that have research objects that allow systematic observation, repeated experimental verification and reproducible experiments, and the sciences that study essentially unique, non-recurring situations, which, as a rule, do not allow an exact repetition of the experiment, or more than once any experiment.

Modern culture seeks to overcome the differentiation of cognition into many independent directions and disciplines, primarily the split between the natural sciences and the humanities, which was clearly indicated at the end of the 19th century. After all, the world is one in all its infinite diversity, therefore, relatively independent areas unified system human knowledge is organically interconnected; the difference here is transient, the unity is absolute.

In our days, the integration of natural science knowledge is clearly outlined, which manifests itself in many forms and becomes the most pronounced trend in its development. Increasingly, this tendency is manifested in the interaction of the natural sciences with the humanities. This is evidenced by the advancement to the forefront of modern science of the principles of consistency, self-organization and global evolutionism, which open up the possibility of combining a wide variety of scientific knowledge into an integral and consistent system, united by the general laws of evolution of objects of different nature.

There is every reason to believe that we are witnessing an increasing convergence and mutual integration of the natural sciences and the humanities. This is confirmed by the widespread use in humanitarian research of not only technical means and information technologies, used in natural and technical sciences, but also general scientific research methods developed in the process of development of natural science.

The subject of this course is concepts related to the forms of existence and movement of living and inanimate matter, while the laws that determine the course of social phenomena are the subject of the humanities. However, it should be borne in mind that, no matter how different the natural and human sciences may differ, they have a common genus, which is the logic of science. It is the subordination of this logic that makes science a sphere of human activity aimed at identifying and theoretically systematizing objective knowledge about reality.

The natural-scientific picture of the world is created and modified by scientists of different nationalities, including convinced atheists and believers of various faiths and confessions. However, in its professional activity they all proceed from the fact that the world is material, that is, it exists objectively regardless of the people who study it. Note, however, that the process of cognition itself can influence the studied objects of the material world and how a person imagines them, depending on the level of development of research tools. In addition, every scientist assumes that the world is fundamentally cognizable.

Process scientific knowledge Is a search for truth. but absolute truth in science is incomprehensible, and with each step along the path of knowledge, it is pushed further and deeper. Thus, at each stage of knowledge, scientists establish relative truth, realizing that at the next stage, knowledge will be achieved more accurate, to a greater extent adequate to reality. And this is another evidence that the process of cognition is objective and inexhaustible.

In the history of science until the 19th century, natural and humanitarian trends were not distinguished, and scientists until that time gave preference to natural science, that is, the study of objectively existing ones. In the 19th century, the division of sciences began at universities: the humanities, which were responsible for the study of cultural, social, spiritual, moral and other types of human activity, were separated into a separate area. And everything else falls under the concept of natural science, the name of which comes from the Latin "essence".

The history of natural sciences began about three thousand years ago, but separate disciplines did not exist then - philosophers were engaged in all areas of knowledge. Only at the time of the development of navigation began the division of sciences: astronomy also appeared, these areas were necessary during travel. As technology developed into independent sections, and.

The principle of philosophical naturalism is applied to the study of natural sciences: this means that the laws of nature must be investigated without mixing them with the laws of man and excluding the action of human will. Natural science has two main goals: the first is to research and systematize data about the world, and the second is to use the knowledge gained for practical purposes to conquer nature.

Types of natural sciences

There are basic ones that have existed as independent areas for quite some time. These are physics, chemistry, geography, astronomy, geology. But often the spheres of their research intersect, forming new sciences at the junctions - biochemistry, geophysics, geochemistry, astrophysics and others.

Physics is one of the most important natural sciences, its modern development began with Newton's classical theory of gravity. Faraday, Maxwell and Ohm continued the development of this science, and by XX in the field of physics, when it became known that Newtonian mechanics is limited and imperfect.

Chemistry began to develop on the basis of alchemy, its modern history begins in 1661, when Boyle's The Skeptic Chemist came out. Biology did not appear until the 19th century, when the distinction between living and nonliving matter was finally established. Geography was formed during the search for new lands and the development of navigation, and geology stood out as a separate area thanks to Leonardo da Vinci.

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What are natural sciences? Natural Science Methods

IN modern world there are thousands of different sciences, educational disciplines, sections and other structural links. However, a special place among all is occupied by those that relate directly to a person and everything that surrounds him. It is a system of natural sciences. Of course, all other disciplines are also important. But it is this group that has the most ancient origins, and therefore of particular importance in the life of people.

The answer to this question is simple. These are disciplines that study a person, his health, as well as the entire environment: soil, atmosphere, Earth as a whole, space, nature, substances that make up all living and inanimate bodies, their transformations.

The study of natural sciences has been interesting to people since antiquity. How to get rid of the disease, what the body consists of from the inside, why the stars shine and what they are, as well as millions of similar questions - this is what has interested humanity from the very beginning of its origin. The answers to them are given by the disciplines under consideration.

Therefore, to the question of what the natural sciences are, the answer is unequivocal. These are disciplines that study nature and all living things.

There are several main groups that relate to natural sciences:

  1. Chemical (analytical, organic, inorganic, quantum, physical colloidal chemistry, chemistry of organoelement compounds).
  2. Biological (anatomy, physiology, botany, zoology, genetics).
  3. Physical (physics, physical chemistry, physical and mathematical sciences).
  4. Earth sciences (astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, astrochemistry, space biology).
  5. Earth shell sciences (hydrology, meteorology, mineralogy, paleontology, physical geography, geology).

Only basic natural sciences are presented here. However, it should be understood that each of them has its own subsections, industries, subsidiary and subsidiary disciplines. And if you combine all of them into a single whole, then you can get a whole natural complex of sciences, numbering in hundreds of units.

Moreover, it can be divided into three large groups disciplines:

Interaction of disciplines with each other

Of course, no discipline can exist in isolation from others. All of them are in close harmonious interaction with each other, forming a single complex. So, for example, knowledge of biology would be impossible without the use of technical means constructed on the basis of physics.

At the same time, it is impossible to study transformations within living beings without knowledge of chemistry, because each organism is a whole factory of reactions occurring at a colossal speed.

The relationship between the natural sciences has always been traced. Historically, the development of one of them entailed intensive growth and accumulation of knowledge in the other. As soon as new lands began to be developed, islands and land areas were discovered, both zoology and botany were immediately developed. After all, new habitats were inhabited (albeit not all) by previously unknown representatives of the human race. Thus, geography and biology are closely linked.

If we talk about astronomy and related disciplines, it is impossible not to note the fact that they developed thanks to scientific discoveries in physics and chemistry. The design of the telescope has largely determined the success in this field.

There are a lot of similar examples. They all illustrate the close relationship between all natural disciplines that make up one huge group. Below we will consider the methods of natural sciences.

Before dwelling on the research methods used by the sciences under consideration, it is necessary to designate the objects of their study. They are:

Each of these objects has its own characteristics, and for their study it is necessary to select one or another method. Among those, as a rule, the following are distinguished:

  1. Observation is one of the simplest, most effective and ancient ways to learn about the world.
  2. Experiment is the foundation of the chemical sciences, most of the biological and physical disciplines. Allows you to get the result and draw a conclusion about the theoretical basis from it.
  3. Comparison - this method is based on the use of historically accumulated knowledge on a particular issue and comparing them with the results obtained. Based on the analysis, a conclusion is made about the innovation, quality and other characteristics of the object.
  4. Analysis. This method may include mathematical modeling, taxonomy, generalization, performance. Most often it is final after a number of other studies.
  5. Measurement - used to assess the parameters of specific objects of animate and inanimate nature.

There are also the most recent ones, modern methods research that is used in physics, chemistry, medicine, biochemistry and genetic engineering, genetics and other important sciences. It:

Of course, this is far from full list... There are many different adaptations for working in each area of ​​scientific knowledge. Everything requires an individual approach, which means that a set of methods is formed, equipment and equipment are selected.

Modern problems of natural science

The main problems of natural sciences on the present stage development is the search for new information, the accumulation of a theoretical knowledge base in a more in-depth, rich format. Before the beginning of the 20th century the main problem the disciplines in question were opposed to the humanitarian branches.

However, today this obstacle is no longer relevant, since humanity has realized the importance of interdisciplinary integration in mastering knowledge about man, nature, space and other things.

Now the disciplines of the natural science cycle face a different task: how to preserve nature and protect it from the influence of man himself and his economic activity? And the problems here are the most pressing:

  • acid rain;
  • Greenhouse effect;
  • destruction of the ozone layer;
  • extinction of plant and animal species;
  • air pollution and others.

In most cases, in response to the question "What are natural sciences?" one word comes to mind at once - biology. This is the opinion of most people who are not related to science. And this is absolutely correct opinion. After all, what, if not biology, directly and very closely connects nature and man?

All disciplines that make up this science are aimed at studying living systems, their interaction with each other and with environment... Therefore, it is quite normal that it is biology that is considered the founder of the natural sciences.

In addition, it is also one of the most ancient. After all, people's interest in themselves, their bodies, surrounding plants and animals originated with a person. Genetics, medicine, botany, zoology, anatomy are closely related to the same discipline. All these branches make up biology as a whole. They also give us a complete picture of nature, and of man, and of all living systems and organisms.

These science, fundamental in the development of knowledge about bodies, substances and natural phenomena, are no less ancient than biology. They also developed along with the development of a person, his formation in a social environment. The main tasks of these sciences is the study of all bodies of inanimate and living nature from the point of view of the processes occurring in them, their relationship with the environment.

So, physics considers natural phenomena, mechanisms and reasons for their occurrence. Chemistry is based on the knowledge of substances and their interconversion into each other.

That's what natural sciences are.

And finally, let's list the disciplines that allow you to learn more about our home, whose name is Earth. These include:

In total, there are about 35 different disciplines. Together they study our planet, its structure, properties and features, which is so necessary for the life of people and the development of the economy.

Natural Sciences... What sciences are called natural?

Natural sciences are called natural sciences, that is, about nature. Astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, meteorology, volcanology, seismology, oceanology, geophysics, astrophysics, geochemistry, and a number of others are studying inanimate nature and its development. Nature studied by biological sciences (paleontology studies extinct organisms, taxonomy - species and their classification, arachnology - spiders, ornithology - birds, entomology - insects).

Natural sciences include those that study nature and all its manifestations, that is, physics, biology, chemistry, geography, ecology, astronomy.

The opposite to the natural sciences will be the humanities, which study a person, his activities, consciousness and manifestation in various fields. These include history, psychology and others.

Natural is a word that, by itself and by its presence, tells us that something should happen in nature. Well, science, of course, is the field of activity that, this whole thing, thoroughly and scrupulously, studies and identifies general, but at the same time fundamental, regularities.

Science is a sphere of human activity, which is aimed at the theoretical systematization of knowledge about reality, which is of an objective nature.

Science and scientific knowledge

The basis of any science is the collection of facts, their processing, systematization, as well as critical analysis, which allows you to build a causal relationship.

Hypotheses and theories, which are confirmed by facts or experiments, are formulated in the form of the laws of society or the laws of nature.

Scientific knowledge is a system of knowledge about the laws of society, nature, thinking. It is scientific knowledge that reflects the laws of the development of the world and constitutes its scientific picture.

Scientific knowledge arises from the comprehension of human activity and the surrounding reality. Scientific knowledge has different kinds reliability.

System of Sciences

In its subject of study, science is not homogeneous, it forms many separate systems of sciences. In the period of antiquity, all scientific knowledge was united by philosophy - that is, there was a single scientific system.

Over time, mathematics, medicine and astrology separated from philosophy. During the Renaissance, separate systems of sciences became chemistry and physics.

At the end of the 19th century, sociology, psychology and biology acquired the status of independent scientific knowledge. Conventionally, all sciences, according to their subject of study, can be divided into three large systems:

Social sciences (sociology, history, religious studies, social studies);

Engineering sciences (agronomy, mechanics, construction and architecture);

Natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics)

Natural Sciences

Natural sciences are a system of sciences that study the influence of external natural phenomena on human life. The basis of the natural sciences is the correlation of the laws of nature with the laws that a person deduced in the course of his activities.

All natural sciences are based on natural science - a science that directly studies natural phenomena. The most significant contributions to the development of natural sciences were made by such great scientists as Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal and Mikhail Lomonosov.

Social Sciences

Social sciences are a system of sciences, the main subject of study of which is the study of the laws of the functioning of society, as well as its main components. The problems of society were of interest to mankind even in the period of antiquity.

It was then that questions began to be raised for the first time about what is the role of the individual in public life what the state should be, what is needed in order to create a society of general prosperity.

The founders of modern social sciences are Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes. It was they who first formulated the philosophical basis for the development of society.

Research methods

In modern science, there are two main research methods: theoretical and empirical. The empirical method of research is the accumulation of facts, observation of a phenomenon and the search for a logical connection between fact and phenomenon.