HI(S)TORY and SCIENCE

       This being the first post in the year 2014 , I thought of writing a series of post about the basic facts and old forgotten history. Many people tend to not like the subject history, but we tend to forget the less known fact that even history is a science.There is a slight difference between history and science. The former  is the inquiry, and knowledge acquired through investigation and the latter is knowledge acquired through Experiments.

  History and science both  operate under the fact that objectivity is the basic component of any investigation and that the results and the data should b public.Both have similar rules and procedures for constituting the evidence.Both take these rules as a matter for discussion and debate.

Science is the study of present for a better future; whereas history is the study of past for a better future.And even science has a history.

According to Arthur Marwick The great value of the ‘Is history a science?’ debate is the manner in which it helps clarify the nature of history and to delimit what history can, and cannot do. To the ordinary common-sense mortal, the most striking difference between history and natural science is the degree to which  proof can be established of the various contentions made by the scientist and  the historian respectively. I say ‘degree’, though the more self-regarding historians would probably join with history’s severest critics in saying there is little or no similarity between the scientist’s methods and the historian’s ‘intuition,’ between the scientist’s empirical expertise and the historian’s creative flights. Yet neither ‘intuition’ nor ‘creation’ need represent a fundamental divide between history and science.

 The gifted scientist will usually develop a ‘feel’ for his subject which may not be greatly different from the intuition of which some historians boast. The scientist of course will attempt empirically to demonstrate the validity of any hunch he may have; his ‘feel’ will take him in the direction of  trying one kind of experiment rather than another, not towards stating untested assumptions. But again this is not terribly different from the way the professional historian (as distinct from the inspired charlatan) sets to work; intuition may suggest certain causal connections but the historian will do his best from the material at his disposal to establish at least the probability of such a casual relationship; better still he may be stimulated to seek for entirely new source materials (rather as a scientist might devise an entirely new type of experiment). On the matter of ‘creativity,’ it is surely not to be contested that Einstein’s theory of relatively is one of the great monuments to human creative thinking.

 Of course most practicing scientists are engaged on much more basic tasks; but then a large number of historians are engaged on pretty mundane work as well.

All in all "If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

E. O. Wilson"