According to a widespread philosophical opinion, science is strictly limited to investigating natural causes and putting forth natural explanations. Lacking the tools to evaluate supernatural claims, science must remain studiously neutral on questions of metaphysics. This (self-imposed) stricture, which goes under the name of "methodological…

Language is a complex adaptive system: Speakers are agents who interact with each other, and their past and current interactions feed into speakers' future behavior in complex ways. In this article, we describe the social cognitive linguistic basis for this analysis of language and a mathematical model developed in collaboration between…

Instructors of general chemistry often pepper their introductory quantum lectures with either historical or philosophical notes so as to lessen the strangeness of the subject. Comparisons between the behavior of macroscopic and microscopic objects are also frequently used. This article presents an epistemological discussion on the conceptual…

Summarizes the development of the Earth's age calculation including the work of Archbishop Ussher, James Hutton, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Bertram Boltwood, and Arthur Holmes. Describes the changes in radioisotope dating methods. (YP)

Describes a procedure that allows undergraduate students to determine the approximate age of the universe using their own data. The experiment requires a relatively small telescope with a modest spectrograph. Includes sample data and calculations. (Contains 11 references.) (Author/WRM)

Explains changes in the scientific world view. Describes the classical mechanistic-reductionist paradigm and some modern examples of changes including evolution, self-organizing universe, non-linearity, subjectivity, and software. (YP)

Discusses magnetic polarity stratigraphy as a tool for correlation of fossiliferous terrestrial deposits. Explains the strengths, weaknesses, limitations, preferred conditions, sampling, laboratory analysis, and applications of this technique. A table of paleomagnetic studies on vertebrate-bearing terrestrial sections arranged by age and locality…

Illustrates qualitative and metaphoric applications of entropy in the areas of cosmology, the birth and death of the universe and time; life and evolution; literature and art; and social science. (RT)

One of the more effective ways to convey the story of our origin and evolution is to present the entire chronicle in a multimedia format that allows today's tech-savvy students to browse at will, thereby extracting parts of the story at their own pace and comfort. This article describes an interactive CD-ROM (included in this issue of "The Science…