Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. [1] The term law has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) across all fields of natural science (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geoscience, biology).
A scientific theory differs from a scientific fact or scientific law in that a theory seeks to explain "why" or "how", whereas a fact is a simple, basic observation and a law is an empirical description of a relationship between facts and/or other laws.
There are also laws ascribed to individuals by others, such as Murphy's law; or given eponymous names despite the absence of the named person. Named laws range from significant scientific laws such as Newton's laws of motion, to humorous examples such as Murphy's law.
For example, physical laws such as the law of gravity or scientific laws attempt to describe the fundamental nature of the universe itself. Laws of mathematics and logic describe the nature of rational thought and inference (Kant's transcendental idealism, and differently G. Spencer-Brown's work Laws of Form, was precisely a determination of the a priori laws governing human thought before any ...
Biological rules and laws are often developed as succinct, broadly applicable ways to explain complex phenomena or salient observations about the ecology and biogeographical distributions of plant and animal species around the world, though they have been proposed for or extended to all types of organisms. Many of these regularities of ecology ...
The laws of thermodynamics are a set of scientific laws which define a group of physical quantities, such as temperature, energy, and entropy, that characterize thermodynamic systems in thermodynamic equilibrium.
The term nomological is derived from the Greek word νόμος or nomos, meaning "law". [1] The DN model holds to a view of scientific explanation whose conditions of adequacy (CA)—semiformal but stated classically—are derivability (CA1), lawlikeness (CA2), empirical content (CA3), and truth (CA4). [2]
The history of scientific method considers changes in the methodology of scientific inquiry, not the history of science itself. The development of rules for scientific reasoning has not been straightforward; scientific method has been the subject of intense and recurring debate throughout the history of science, and eminent natural philosophers and scientists have argued for the primacy of ...