April Entry 2 - How can we be sure that scientific evidence gained through the use of technology is genuine?

 April Entry - 2

How can we be sure that scientific evidence gained through the use of technology is genuine?

Science is a very wide scope of area for knowledge. It has kept on advancing due to discoveries made every single day. Here technology plays a major role in the discovery of different things. We are not denying the fact that technology can be really helpful in advancements of science but how far can we rely or sustain on these hypothesis derived on the basis of technology. Scientific evidence is information gathered from scientific research, which takes a lot of time and patience to conduct. But there are a few things that all this research needs to have in common to make it possible for decision-makers, and ultimately all of us, to accept it as “evidence”.

So Science is a vast area of knowledge. That is why I have chosen the Science domain. It consists of many different branches and many divisions. The information under these different areas of Science is of a large amount in extreme detail. When we look at the definition of Science, we see its through explanation. Science is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Science is what we do to find out about the natural world. Natural sciences include, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, and physics. Science also uses mathematics and logic, which are sometimes called formal Sciences, however I am not going to cover that here. People who study and research Science and try to find out everything about it are called Scientists. 

So what is a knowledge question? Knowledge questions are questions about the concept of knowledge and what it means to know. Knowledge question urge you to focus on TOK ideas rather than things you would normally discuss in subject lessons. They draw on TOK concepts such as "evidence", "certainty", "values" and "interpretation."Knowledge questions find their origin from the real world and a knowledge question should be applicable to other real world examples. 

What is technology? The definition of technology is science or knowledge put into practical use to solve problems or invent useful tools. Discoveries and breakthroughs are being made everyday in the Science world. However dating a little while back we had very limited resources and information to discover new things and explain different phenomenons. So people struggled however as the times went on the discovery scale was also increasing. Soon we reached a time where we had technology. This helped Scientists to escalate their discoveries and their testing so it was originally really helpful.

Now it is generally very important to ensure that results in the lab are always very accurate and most importantly valid. To test this the sample must be run through many tests. However as we cant really use real time to test these samples, we use technology to create a simulation for us to test these samples. However we never see this happening in the real world around us. Take for example the neonicotinoid issue. Here when running tests on these pesticides, they could not be tried on he real world so it was assumed that this should work this way according to technological simulations. Afterwards when the pesticide was released and used in many places, they started to notice that this pesticide was affecting the crops as well as the animals in a bad way. So it resulted to banning the three branches of pesticides.

However arguments have risen that the scientific developments that have been made by using the help of technology may not be so genuine. However to this date even though Scientific breakthroughs have been proven wrong it has always been that way and it is not always necessarily related to technology. In my opinion technology has helped escalate our rate of discovery and more things are being found to this day. I feel like technology is very useful and genuine knowledge has been gained by the help of technology.