Humanities and natural sciences. Natural and human sciences

Cognitive : this is the main function that reflects the essence of science. It consists in understanding the world and arming people with new knowledge. Examples: medical scientists have conducted a number of studies of infectious diseases; seismologists study the physical processes that occur during earthquakes.

Cultural and ideological : science influences the formation of the human personality, determines its relationship to nature and society. A person who does not have scientific knowledge, who bases his reasoning and actions only on personal everyday experience, can hardly be called cultural. Examples: a group of scientists put forward a new hypothesis of the origin of life on our planet; philosophical studies prove that there are an infinite number of galaxies in the Universe; N. checks and critically comprehends scientific information.

Production : science is a special "workshop" designed to supply production new technology and technologies. Examples: pharmaceutical scientists have created a new drug to fight viruses; genetic engineers have developed a new method of weed control.

Social : science affects the living conditions of people, the nature of labor, the system of social relations. Examples: studies have shown that a 1% increase in education spending in the coming years will lead to an increase in the rate of economic development; Hearings were held in the State Duma, at which scientific forecasts of the prospects for the development of the space industry in the Russian Federation were discussed.

predictive : science not only equips people with new knowledge about the world, but also makes predictions further development world, pointing out the consequences of change. Examples: Soviet theoretical physicist, academician A.D. Sakharov published an article entitled "The Danger of Thermonuclear War"; environmental scientists warned about the danger of pollution of the waters of the Volga River for living organisms.

Scientists and social responsibility

Science includes not only a system of knowledge, but also scientific institutions and scientists. recognized center fundamental research science in our country is Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) - the heiress of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Peter the Great, who moved to Moscow in 1934. The RAS includes the largest scientists conducting research in medicine, agriculture, education, energy and many other areas. Scientists, researchers, experts, laboratory assistants are a special category of people. They have a scientific outlook and take great pleasure in scientific research. creative activity. Their works contribute to the development of a certain branch of science. The main task scientists is to obtain, substantiate and systematize new true knowledge about the real world.

The reality around us scientific knowledge reflected in the form of concepts and terms. This is the fundamental difference between science and art or religion, which reflect knowledge about the world figuratively. Features scientific thinking and activities of scientists are:

• selection of objective, reliable and accurate scientific facts;
• formulating a problem and building a hypothesis that can solve it;
• use of special research methods and data collection;
• theoretical substantiation of concepts, principles, laws;
• testing knowledge with evidence.

• the principle of "do no harm";
• there is no place for subjectivity in science;
• truth is dearest of all;
• honestly recognize the merits of your predecessors and many others.

Exercise: Illustrate any function of science with an example🎓

The worldview platform of any person is based on his ideas about the picture of the world. How does the Universe work, what laws underlie its dynamics, did it exist forever, or did it have a beginning, how and when does life originate in the Universe, what is the meaning of life, what place does a person occupy in the Universe? Depending on the answer to such questions, a person builds his behavior and attitude towards the world.

The purpose of education, among other things, is the formation in a person of such a worldview that corresponds to scientific ideas. However, modern science has long gone beyond the boundaries of ordinary human thinking. Some scientific theories seem quite far from the concept common sense.The modern picture of the world is full of paradoxes. Science deals with the study of objectively existing (i.e., existing independently of one's consciousness) natural phenomena. All scientific disciplines are conditionally divided into two main groups: natural sciences (engaged in the study of objects and phenomena that are not a product of human or human activity) and humanitarian (study phenomena and objects that arose as a result of human activity).

“Science is the most important, the most beautiful and necessary in a person’s life” - The great Russian writer A.P. Chekhov (1860-1904). However, such an unambiguous idea of ​​science does not always find understanding in Everyday life. The attitude of society to science and especially to natural science is determined mainly by the understanding of the value of science at a given moment in time. The value of science is often viewed from two perspectives. What does science give people to improve their lives? What does it give to a small group of people who study nature and want to know how the world around us works? Applied sciences are considered valuable in the first sense, and fundamental sciences in the second sense.

Any science aims to reveal the mechanisms of phenomena, the laws by which reality is built. This allows you to predict the results of the processes, use them for your own purposes. Objects of study humanities(history, sociology, linguistics, economics, jurisprudence, etc.) is a person and the relationship between people. Therefore, the laws they study bear the imprint of subjectivity, which often causes a lot of controversy about their justice. The subject of study of the natural sciences (physics, astronomy, cosmology, cosmogony, chemistry, biology, geography, etc.) is nature. The formulations of the laws of nature do not allow subjectivity, although, as it turns out, this cannot be completely avoided.

Natural science is a set of sciences about the phenomena and laws of nature, including many natural science branches.

Humanities - a set of sciences about man and relations between people, study the phenomena of objects that have arisen as a result of human activity.

The main criterion of scientific character in natural science is causality, truth, relativity.

The main criterion of scientific character in humanities this is an understanding of the processes, the scientific character is affected by a person.

Natural science is the science of the phenomena and laws of nature. Modern natural science includes many natural science branches: physics, chemistry, biology, physical chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, geochemistry, etc. It covers wide range questions about the various properties of objects of nature, which can be considered as a whole.

The division of natural science problems into applied and fundamental ones is often carried out on a purely formal basis: problems that are posed to scientists from outside, i.e. by the customer, are referred to as applied, and the problems that have arisen within the science itself are referred to as fundamental.

The word "fundamental" should not be considered equivalent to the words "important", "large", etc. Applied research can be very great importance and for science itself, while basic research: may be insignificant. There is an opinion that it is enough to make high demands on the level of fundamental research in order to achieve the desired goal, and sooner or later, high-level research will find application.

The results of many fundamental studies, unfortunately, will never find application, which is due to various reasons.

To date, unfortunately, there is no exact criterion for determining fundamental and applied problems, there are no clear rules for separating useful research from useless, and therefore society is forced to bear the costs.

The value of fundamental research lies not only in the possible benefit from it tomorrow, but also in the fact that it allows maintaining a high scientific level of applied research. The relatively low level of research in branch institutes is often explained by the absence of works devoted to fundamental problems in them.

In our time, natural science knowledge has become a sphere of active actions and represents the basic resource of the economy, which in its importance surpasses material resources: capital, land, labor, etc. Natural scientific knowledge and based on them modern technologies form new look life, and a highly educated person cannot distance himself from fundamental knowledge about the world around him without risking being helpless in his professional activities.

Among the numerous branches of knowledge, natural scientific knowledge - knowledge about nature - is distinguished by a number of key features; first of all, their practical significance and usefulness (on their basis, various production technologies are created), natural scientific knowledge gives a holistic view of nature, of which man himself is an integral part. They broaden their horizons and serve as the main basis for studying and assimilation of everything new that each person needs to manage not only their activities, but also production, a group of people, society, and the state. For a long time natural scientific knowledge correlated mainly with the sphere of being, the sphere of human existence. Over time, they have become a realm of action. If in former times knowledge was seen as a predominantly private good, now it is a public good.

Natural scientific knowledge, like other types of knowledge, differs significantly from monetary, natural/labor and other resources.” Increasingly, they are called intellectual capital, a public good. Knowledge does not decrease as it is used, and it is inalienable: the acquisition of some knowledge by one person does not interfere with the acquisition of the same knowledge by other people, which cannot be said, for example, about a pair of shoes bought. The knowledge embodied in a book is worth the same, no matter how many people read it. Of course, many buyers cannot buy the same copy of a book at the same time, and the cost of a publication depends on the circulation. However, these economic factors are material carrier knowledge-book, and not to the knowledge itself.

As a result of its intangible knowledge in the form of information, they acquire the quality of durability and there are no boundaries for their distribution.

2. HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY RELATIONSHIP. REJECTION OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF CLASSICAL DETERMINISM

Experimental facts (electron diffraction, the Compton effect, the photoelectric effect, and many others) and theoretical models, such as the Bohr model of the atom, clearly show that the laws of classical physics are becoming inapplicable for describing the behavior of atoms and molecules and their interaction with light. During the decade between 1920 and 1930 a number of prominent physicists of the twentieth century. (de Broglie, Heisenberg, Born, Schrödinger, Bohr, Pauli, etc.) was engaged in the construction of a theory that could adequately describe the phenomena of the microworld. As a result, quantum mechanics was born, which became the basis of all modern theories structure of matter, one might say, the basis (together with the theory of relativity) of physics of the twentieth century.

The laws of quantum mechanics are applicable in the microcosm, at the same time we are macroscopic objects and live in the macrocosm governed by completely different, classical laws. Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the provisions of quantum mechanics cannot be verified by us directly and are perceived as strange, impossible, unusual. Nevertheless, quantum mechanics is probably the most experimentally confirmed theory, since the consequences of calculations performed according to the laws of this theory are used in almost everything that surrounds us and have become part of human civilization.

Unfortunately, the mathematical apparatus used by quantum mechanics is rather complicated, and the ideas of quantum mechanics can only be stated verbally and therefore not convincingly enough. With this remark in mind, we will try to give at least some idea of ​​these ideas.

The basic concept of quantum mechanics is the concept of the quantum state of some micro-object, or micro-system (it can be a separate particle, atom, molecule, set of atoms, etc.). The state can be characterized by setting quantum numbers: values ​​of energy, momentum, angular momentum, projection of this angular momentum onto some axis, charge, etc. As follows from the Bohr model for the hydrogen atom, energy and other characteristics can in some cases take only a discrete series of values, numbered by the number n = 1, 2, ... (at this point, quantum mechanics completely contradicts classical physics).

Thus, quantum mechanics, in the general case, does not operate with certain results of measurements of certain physical quantities, but only with the probabilities that this or that value of the quantity will be obtained during the measurement. This quantum mechanics is fundamentally different from classical physics.

Another fundamental difference is that it is not always possible to measure some quantity with arbitrarily high accuracy. The very act of measurement in the microcosm has an irreversible effect on the measured object.

This fact is expressed in the Heisenberg uncertainty relation:

D p x * D x ³

Here = h/(2p) is Planck's constant "ab with a bar", which appears so often in most formulas of quantum mechanics that physicists prefer to use it instead of h.

Numerically = 1.05 * 10 -34 J * s

The meaning of the uncertainty relation lies in the fact that it is impossible to simultaneously measure additional (according to the terminology of N. Bohr) quantities, for example, the position and momentum of a micro-object. Any attempt to increase the accuracy of the position measurement results in the loss of momentum information, and vice versa. It should be clearly understood that we are not talking about the imperfection of instruments for measurement. The limitations imposed by the uncertainty relation are of a fundamental nature, independent of the design of the instruments. These restrictions are the law operating in the microcosm.

The Heisenberg uncertainty relation put a fundamental ban on the possibility of an accurate description of the world, which was the cornerstone of mechanistic science classical period, expressed in the philosophy of Laplace's determinism (if we know the initial data, we can absolutely accurately calculate the future). If in classical physics the concept of randomness is used to describe the behavior of systems with a large number of elements of the same type and is only a conscious sacrifice to the completeness of the description in the name of simplifying the solution of the problem, then in quantum physics it is recognized that in the microcosm accurate forecast behavior of objects is apparently impossible at all. It seems that nature itself does not know the exact answer to some questions.

In addition, in quantum mechanics it is fundamentally different from classical law adding the probabilities of mutually exclusive (from the classical point of view) events (for example, the passage of an electron through one of the slits). In the classical concept, the probabilities always add up, which leads to the expectation that when two slits are opened, a picture equal to the sum of the images obtained from each of the slits separately will be found. In quantum mechanics, this law is not always true. If the situation is such that the events are fundamentally indistinguishable, the total probability is calculated as the square of the modulus of the sum complex functions, called probability amplitudes. In this case, the probabilities do not add up.

When moving in empty space, the amplitude of the transition of a particle from one point to another coincides with the expression for a plane monochromatic wave. In the case of large masses that make up a system of bodies, the limitations on the accuracy of measurements tend to zero, and the laws of quantum mechanics turn into the laws of classical physics. Therefore, if a room has two doors, then a person leaving one door will, in principle, "interfer" like an electron in the experiment with slits, due to which several areas will appear in space where it can appear. However, due to the large mass of a person, the probabilities of finding a person in other areas, except for one, will tend to zero. Therefore, we do not observe our doubles.

3. PRINCIPLE OF OPTIMALITY

Apart from the fact that the stone “calculates” the trajectory of its movement in advance, we have to admit that nature, of all possible laws, has chosen only those that obey the principles of variation. This position can be called the principle of optimality laws of nature. This law operates at all levels of the world order. For example, one of the axioms on which modern ecology is built is Commoner's Third Law: Nature Knows Best.

The optimal state can be understood as such a state of the system as a whole, which practically does not change or changes in the minimum possible way with various variations of the internal structure (such a state is also called equilibrium). The most revealing in this sense is precisely the principle of least action. So if, among the possible paths connecting the initial and final points of the trajectory (Fig.), draw several trajectories and calculate the magnitude of the action for each of them, and then slightly change (variate) each of these trajectories, then for almost all trajectories the magnitude of the action will change significantly , and only for a parabolic (that is, true) trajectory, the magnitude of the action will be almost the same.

This is reminiscent of solving the problem of mathematical analysis of finding the extremum (optimum) of a function, only the function in this case has an integral character and is called functionality, and the functional takes its minimum value not at some value of the argument, but at some form of the trajectory (in this case).

A typical manifestation of the principle of optimality is, apparently, the principle of entropy growth (the second law of thermodynamics), which in this case can be formulated as follows: any system tends to a state in which any variations of this state do not lead to a significant change in the entropy, which in this state takes a value close to the maximum possible.

The question reasonably arises: if at any moment of time nature realizes only optimal states and processes, why is there so much absurdity in the world, errors that are far from the concept of optimality? Is there any optimality in the behavior of a fly beating against glass? It turns out that there is, because in this case the fly uses one of the most efficient algorithms for finding the optimal solution, the random search method, which guarantees that the solution will be found sooner or later, if it is possible in principle. Nature very often uses such optimization algorithms. Without a certain amount of error, absurdity, chance, nature would not be able to develop and complicate its forms. Systems whose structure is devoid of errors are not able to develop (find the optimum). Therefore, they collapse rather quickly (accumulate an error).

The presence in the Universe of holistic principles that "select" the laws of nature according to the principle of optimality requires a rethinking of the scientific attitude to the phenomenon expediency in the Universe. One of the cornerstones of the science of the mechanistic period was the denial of the expediency of the world order ( antiteliology), which is associated with God. The desire to "expel God from the temple of science" gave rise to a denial of the expediency of the world in general. It was generally accepted that the world is ruled by "blind" laws of nature, the Universe has no purpose, the very existence of the Universe is a grandiose, but completely random event.

True, this does not correlate with the observed expediency of the world, which is so obvious that it gave rise in science to the so-called anthropic principle, which says that nature is arranged so because a person lives in it, capable of observing it, studying its laws. Of course, cause and effect are reversed here.

Still, it seems strange why the laws of nature, the values ​​of world constants, etc. are so precisely adjusted to each other that if, for example, Planck's constant changed by at least some ten thousandth of a percent, then the world would no longer have the right to exist, and the Universe would simply disappear. We know that nature is built on the existence of rational laws, but why do these laws exist?

The answer to this question, apparently, lies in the recognition of the dual nature of the Universe, which, along with the multiple aspect of its existence, has a holistic aspect in which the Universe appears as something integral and indivisible. So far, this hypothesis has been seriously discussed only within the framework of such a science as philosophy. Natural science is extremely cautious about the questions of the expediency of the world. For natural science, in which the principles of reductionism are still strong, holism is something alien. But the principle of complementarity says that if we discard the second side of the world from consideration, we will not understand the essence of natural phenomena.

In fact, all the laws that follow from the principles of symmetry are, by and large, holistic. Therefore, whether we like it or not, all modern natural science is built on the principles of holism. We may not always know the mechanics of this or that phenomenon, but we know for sure that the principles of symmetry will not be violated in this phenomenon. We may not know what laws lie in the mechanics of a given phenomenon, but we absolutely know for sure that nature will necessarily implement some kind of mechanics that will correspond to the variational principles, that is, it will be the most optimal of all possible.

Optimality algorithm. The birth of the law of nature

To understand how the birth of such mechanics, more precisely, the birth of the law of nature, it is advisable to consider the behavior of complex systems, such as biosystems. So one of the laws of ecology is the principle of conformity of the structure of organisms to the requirements environment . Of particular interest is the phenomenon convergence(convergence) of morphological features various kinds animals living in the same environmental conditions. For example, animals of different origins, such as fish (such as sharks), birds (such as penguins) and mammals (such as dolphins), living in similar conditions, acquire similar forms.

Natural selection in the living world leads to the fact that sooner or later the species will "feel" the most optimal version of its own structure. As P. Teilhard de Chardin said about this, life, multiplying in multitude, fills all possible options, so sooner or later the best option will be found. Thus life makes itself invulnerable to the blows dealt to it.. A significant role in this is played by the right of life to make a mistake. Generating various kinds of mutants, which for the most part turn out to be unviable, life sometimes gropes for what is the optimum. Whatever the starting points of the search for the optimum (fish, bird, mammal, etc.), the result of the search, in principle, turns out to be predictable, that is under these specific conditions, the number of extrema of any objective function turns out to be limited, most often there is only one extremum.

Something similar happens, apparently, in inanimate nature. Of course, one cannot build direct analogies from the laws according to which the living world develops to nature in general. Life is inherently asymmetrical, inanimate nature is subject to the principles of symmetry. Nevertheless, even the essence of those phenomena that we traditionally attribute to inanimate bone(in the terminology of Vernadsky), we cannot fully understand what indicates the presence of an asymmetric component in them.

It is the violation of symmetry that ultimately leads to the birth of the Universe. So in the first moments after the Big Bang, for some reason, the number of positrons turned out to be slightly less than electrons (the difference is only one particle for every 100 million particle-antiparticle pairs), antiprotons - slightly less than protons, etc. This is a violation of the symmetry of the world, but that is why the world looks like this and not otherwise, that is why it exists at all, and has not disappeared in complete mutual annihilation. This means that what distinguishes the living from the non-living is already present in a primitive form on the lowest floors of the universe. This means that the “laws of life” are also valid at the subquantum level.

Perhaps this is the essence of the birth of the laws of nature, that at all levels of natural systems from elementary particles before galaxies the mechanics of the principle operates natural selection? The answer to this question is intended to be given by the currently emerging new scientific paradigm(foundation), which is based on the so-called systems approach.