Lecture One

1. Lecture One Philosophical Point of View

2. The role of Design of Experiments The design of experiments is useful to attempt to characterize the processes of science and technology. • Observations In science, a reaction to a portion of the world is an observation only if that reaction can be recorded, perhaps only in memory, or better, of course, by actual physical recording.

3. Types of observations 1- The first type consists of placing an observation of an object of observation in a class: for instance, the flower being observed is pink or has pinnate leaves. 2- The second type of observation, which permeates quantitative science, is the measurement of a numerical magnitude, for example, the weight of a piece of rock, which one is confident does not change.

4. Law A “law” states that something must occur. The Creator has decreed so. This is one sense. Another sense, which is really quite different, is that a law is an empirical generalization. • Deduction, Induction and Hypothesis Workers in statistics will have no difficulty in appreciating this third type: a considerable portion of statistical theory and practice is the testing of statistical models.

5. Science One has to go back to the Greeks which leads us, of course, to the question of “What is truth? take as true certain axioms and then deduce the proposition from those axioms by Aristotelianlogic. Descartes(1596-1650), whose prescription was to subject every proposition to extreme doubt. The Kant (1724-1804), had two highly significant ideas. One is that behind the world of phenomena there is a world of noumena, about which we can know nothing. The one such that Kant accepted is “Every event has a cause”. This leads us into the meaning of cause and causality, which we shall take up later.

6. Types of Science 1-The first type is descriptive science, in which man looks at the universe and describes what he sees. 2-The second part of science is the development of theory. • These procedures have two critical properties (Errors): measurement error and the measurement process itself does not affect the properties being measured. • Problems of Science