1. Find a science story in a recent newspaper article or popular magazine. Who were the scientists who conducted the research? Where did they do the work?
2. In what ways does your everyday life involve science?
3. How is observation different from imagination?
4. How might a scientist find patterns in nature? By what means might he or she determine regularities?
5. Why is mathematics considered the "language of science"?
6. Describe the steps of the scientific method.
7. Describe the difference between an observation and an experiment.
8. Why can we think of the scientific method as a cycle?
9. What does it mean for a statement to be falsifiable? Give an example of a statement that is not falsifiable
10. Describe the difference between basic and applied research. Give examples of basic and applied research that might be undertaken in the fields of transportation and health.
11. In what ways do scientists communicate with their colleagues? Why is peer review and communication amongst researchers an essential ingredient in the scientific progress?
12. Why was Earth at the center of the universe in Ptolemy's system?
13. With what ancient science is Stonehenge associated?
14. 2. Why was the Ptolemaic system accepted as an explanation of celestial motion for over a thousand years? What did it explain? What system challenged the idea that Earth was the center of the universe?
15. 3. What were Tyco Brahe's principal contributions to science? How did he try to resolve the question of the structure of the universe?
16. 4. What was Kepler's role in interpreting Tyco Brahe's data?
17. 5. How did Galileo apply the scientific method to his study of falling objects?
18. 6. What is uniform motion? How did Newton's description of uniform motion differ from that of previous scholars?
19. 7. Why is gravity called a universal force?
20. 8. What is the difference between the constants g and G?
21. 9. What is the difference between weight and mass?
22. 10. How does velocity differ from speed? What does it mean to say that velocity is a vector? Name some other vectors?
23. What is the scientific method? Why is it used by scientists to study problems in nature?
24. What is a variable? What is the difference between dependent and independent variables?