Do You Know What Are The Natural Sciences?

Natural science is one of three divisions of science, the other two being the social sciences — psychology, sociology, economics, etc. — and the formal sciences — mathematics, logic, and statistics. The natural sciences are astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, and physics. There are also cross-disciplines such as biophysics which integrate between sciences. Natural science has been practiced for millennia, but prior to the 17th century it was called natural philosophy and was less scientific. The introduction of the scientific method by Sir Francis Bacon and the ensuing scientific revolution came to create what is considered science today.

The natural sciences, especially physics, are often referred to as “hard science” because of the heavy use of objective data and quantitative methods. In contrast, the social sciences rely more on qualitative evaluations and thus tend to have less certain conclusions. The study of human beings in the social science is hampered both by the complexity of humans and the increased tendency towards unscientific bias when studying humans as opposed to, say, rocks.

Much of what defines our modern civilization are advances in knowledge and technology caused by investigations in the natural sciences. For instance, the production of most if not all of the food you eat can be traced back to a chemical process called the Haber-Bosch process which was developed during WWI. This chemical process allows the creation of fertilizer nitrates from atmospheric nitrogen, rather than relying on biologically fixed sources of nitrogen such as cow dung or bat guano.

hanks to developments in biology, especially accelerating in the last half-century, we have advanced medicines capable of curing or treating many diseases that were otherwise fatal. The scourges of the 19th century and before, such as plague and smallpox, are now largely under control or eliminated thanks to biology research. The biological subfield of genetics has allowed us to understand the very code of life itself, and recognize the way it expresses itself within each of us.

Advances in earth science have allowed us to extract huge amounts of minerals and petroleum from the Earth’s crust, powering the engines of modern civilization and industry to the present day. Paleontology, a subfield of Earth science, has given us a window into the Earth’s distant past, long before humans ever existed. This helps us trace the reasons why the spectrum of life and the geology of Earth is the way it is today.

Some of the most fascinating of the natural sciences are physics and astronomy, the most quantitative fields in all of empirical science. Physics is the science that underlies all others, and has been subject some of the most unexpected twists and turns in the last century, most notably the discovery that matter and energy, space and time are each facets of each other. Astronomy has led us to discover an enormous amount about the universe we live in. Up until about a century ago, it was thought that the entire universe was just the Milky Way galaxy, until a series of debates and observations clued us in that it was literally millions of times bigger than we previously imagined.

The natural sciences are one of the most important and interesting fields of human endeavor, and while the specifics of future advances are largely unpredictable, one thing is for sure: scientific findings will continue to improve our lives and fire up our imaginations for a long time to come.