After reading the discussion of the Natural Sciences above, write a paragraph or two discussing what you understand from it about this Division of Academic Knowledge. The point is not to focus on the specifics of the different disciplines, but on how they fit together to create the knowledge of the Division as a whole. Submit with word document DO NOT JUST PARAPHRASE NO OUTSIDE INFORMATION SUMMARIZE WHAT YOU READ FROM THE PASSAGE. Do not paraphrase closely to the text. It’s different summarizing is your interpretation of what you read. thank you reading below

The Natural Sciences

The Natural Science include disciplines that study how things work from the tiniest particles in the universe to the universe as a whole, and living beings from the simplest organisms to neural structures of the human brain. There are many different Disciplines and sub-disciplines that make up the Natural Sciences, and they can and have been organized in many different ways.  The Disciplines presented here are the most important, and their grouping is done to make their overall relationships intelligible in the context of this program and course.

The Three Core Disciplines

The three core disciplines are Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.  The reason they’re grouped together like this is because they can be thought of as forming a hierarchy in which Physics, at one end, focuses on the fundamental forces and objects in the universe; Chemistry, in the middle, focuses on the elements, molecules, and compounds that are made up of the fundamental components Physics studies to form the material world we live in; and Biology, at the other end, focuses on living systems, which are made up of chemical structures so complex and sophisticated that they literally take on a life of their own. 

Physics

Physics includes Classical Physics, which studies the forces that govern physical processes at human scale, like how levers and pulleys work, liquids flow, heat dissipates, and light refracts.  It also studies electro-magnetism and gravity, and these, plus the behavior of light, led to the revolutionary insights of Modern Physics: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. This is not the place to go into details, but Relativity holds, among other things, that mass can be converted into energy (hence the atomic bomb), and as two objects pass at near the speed of light, to each the other’s length will contract, its mass will increase, and time will pass more slowly for it — not as optical illusions or other distortions of perception, but as changes in the physical structure of reality.  Weird stuff, but with Quantum Mechanics things get even weirder: you can determine the location of a subatomic particle or its speed, but not both — again, not because of some defect of measurement, but because measuring for one precludes knowing the other.  Furthermore, particles are also waves, depending on how you test for them, and they can become “entangled” so that what happens to one determines what happens to the other, even though they’re moving so fast away from each other that no information or force could pass between them.  “There’s more between heaven and earth,” as Hamlet said, “than’s dreamt of in” our everyday experience and understanding of reality. 

Chemistry

While exploring the frontiers of particle Physics is intriguing, the more practical implications of Physics is that the behavior of the particles that make up atoms — protons, neutrons, and electrons — form the foundations of Chemistry.  Again without going into too much detail, protons have a positive charge, electrons have a negative charge, and an atom is generally made up of an equal number of protons in the center, like the sun in the solar system, and electrons in orbit around them, like the planets, but held together by electromagnetic charge rather than gravity (neutrons are neutral and serve to bind the protons together — don’t ask!).  

However, electron orbits, or shells, have an optimum number of electrons that can be in them: 2 in the innermost shell, 8 in the second, 18 in the third, and so on.  While atoms normally have the same number of electrons and protons, they also want a filled outer shell, so atoms that don’t naturally fill their outer shell share electrons, so that atoms with only a couple extra bond with those missing just a few.  For example, salt is made up of Sodium, which has 1 electron in its outer shell, and Chloride, which has 17.  In this case, the Sodium atom gives up its outermost electron and the Chloride adds it in, but now the Sodium has one more proton than electron, so a net electromagnetic charge of +1 while the Chloride atom has a net -1 charge (since it has 1 more electron (-) than proton (+)).  Since, as you know, opposites attract, the two atoms stick together with what’s called an ionic bond.  There are also covalent bonds, when the electrons actually orbit both nuclei (the centers of the atoms where the protons and neutrons are — still separate, but linked by their shared outer electron shell).   

This is, of course, a grossly simplified glimpse at chemistry and its underlying physics (for one thing, the sharing of electrons is complicated by the fact that electrons pair up (for reasons having to do with Quantum Mechanics), so sharing involves forming electron pairs as well as filling shells), but it establishes the basic point that while the discipline of Chemistry is about the characteristics and behaviors of the substances that we know — salt, water (two hydrogen and one oxygen atom, H2O), sugar (C6H12O6 – 6 Carbon atoms, 12 Hydrogen atoms, and 6 Oxygen atoms), and so on — these characteristics and behaviors are rooted in the physics of the atoms and subatomic particles that make the substances up.  

To proceed, the first two molecules just mentioned are examples of inorganic molecules, while the third is an example of an organic compound.  The technical difference is that the third, the sugar molecule, contains the element Carbon, which is a component of all organic molecules, while the other two don’t.  The reason Carbon is central to organisms, to life, is because it has 4 electrons in its outer shell, which is half way to its optimum number 8.  This means it can readily share electrons with atoms with fewer than four and with also with atoms with more than four electrons in their outer shells.  Carbon can also share electrons with several atoms of different types, and with other carbon atoms and other elements at the same time, forming complex Carbon chains, with each Carbon bonding with two other Carbons and two other atoms).  The result is the mind-boggling variety  of carbon-based molecules, and even more mind boggling complexity of the molecules, that make up living things.

While Organic Chemistry is the sub-discipline of chemistry that studies the chemical structure of organic substances, the newer sub-discipline of Biochemistry studies the way that living things make use of chemical processes in their functioning: how digestive acids break down foods, how leaves capture the energy of sunlight by using it to cause carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H20) to combine to create sugar (glucose, the C6H12O6 we saw above), which stores the extra energy until it is released when the sugar is broken down.  The process (photosynthesis) of combination also releases Oxygen, which is used by animals in the process of breaking down glucose (respiration), which releases the energy and Carbon Dioxide, which plants use in turn in photosynthesis to trap more of the sun’s energy in glucose.

Biology

Biochemistry is on the border between Chemistry and Biology, which is the science of living things.  Also on this border is Genetics, the study of the (fundamentally chemical) processes by which organisms’ essential characteristics are transmitted to their descendants. Other sub-disciplines of Biology include Cell Biology, which studies the functioning of the basic units of living things (cells: organisms are either single cell, like amoebas, or multi-cellular, like mold, flys, elephants, and us); Botany and Zoology, which study plants and animals, respectively; Ecology, which studies the relationship between living things and their environment; and Evolution, which studies the development of organisms over generations.  This range of topics, from the complex chemical reactions that sustain single cells to the development of species over eons, points to the vast array of phenomena biology studies, but the discipline does have a few core concepts: cells, genes (the subject of genetics), evolution, and homeostasis, the idea that organisms take in energy and materials to create and maintain a stable internal environment in which they can conduct the processes necessary to sustain and reproduce themselves.

The Environmental Disciplines

The term “Environmental Sciences” is usually used for interdisciplinary studies of our immediate environment and our relationship to it: the physical and living setting in which we live, and they way that our actions are shaped by it and shape it.  However,for lack of a better term, here we are going to appropriate the word “environmental” and use it in a different sense: to label the two Disciplines that have to do with the total environment humans live in, the earth we live on, and the universe that surrounds it.  These two Disciplines are Earth Science and Astronomy.

Earth Science

Earth Science studies our home planet by drawing on all of the three Core Disciplines to explain the nature and development of the planetary crust we reside on, the molten material it floats on, the waters that cover most of it, the atmosphere that envelops it, and the ecosystems that cover the exposed crust, infuse the waters, and flit into the lower reaches of the atmosphere.  It draws heavily on physics and chemistry in studying the physical environment, and on chemistry and biology in studying the living systems that populate the earth.  However, so entwined are the physical and living environments that many geological features, like limestone and oil, are the compressed residue of long-dead organisms, while human activity is having such an impact on the physical environment that the most recent geological epoch, the Holocene, Is said to be entering a new period, the anthropocene, when human activity has become the dominant cause of environmental change.

Astronomy

From one perspective, Earth Science is the opposite of Astronomy, the study of the earth beneath our feet and the atmosphere that envelops us, while Astronomy studies the heavens beyond our skies.  From another perspective, though, Earth Science is just a special case of planetary science, the sub-discipline of Astronomy that studies the planets.  Other fields of Astronomy study the stars, including our Sun; galaxies with millions of stars, like the Milky Way, which our sun is part of; and galaxy clusters that include hundreds and even thousands of galaxies, one of which, the Virgo cluster, includes the Milky Way.  Astronomy also studies a variety of exotic phenomena like nebula, huge clouds of interstellar gas in which stars are born; pulsars, sources of enormous bursts of radiation; and black holes, collapsed stars so massive that even light can’t escape them.  It also studies the origins of the universe, for the farther away we look, the further back in time we see; since light takes time to traverse the vast distances of space, the farther away we look, the longer ago the light we see started its journey toward us.  

Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences, dating back to the earliest civilizations, which charted the movements of the heavens to track the passage of time and foretell fateful events.  Even then it was closely connected to physics, as the place of the earth in the universe informed our understanding of motion.  At first, why objects fall down and fire flies up were explained by the idea that different substance sought their proper place in the order of things, with solid things moving down to the earth, which was thought to be the center of the universe, while fire rises to the heavens, where the fiery sun and stars reside.  Later, when it was inferred that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe, the laws of motion had to be revised, and out of that reconceptualization came the concept of inertia — that something in motion will remain in motion until somethings stops it, and something at rest will remain at rest until something pushes it — and the law of gravity, that there is a force that acts across space that pulls objects toward each other with a relation that can be modeled mathematically, relating their masses and the distance they are apart.  Today astronomy and physics are still tightly entwined, with astronomy supplying important data for physics, and physics supplying astronomy with explanations.

Mathematics

Mathematics, the study of shapes and quantities and their relationships, is generally not considered a Natural Science at all because it doesn’t depend on empirical observations to validate its conclusions.  However, it is included here in part because there would otherwise be no place for it in the Three Divisions of Academic Knowledge, which does not seem sensible since it is a vital field of academic study that is closely related, at least, to the Natural Sciences, and in part because a case can be made that it should, indeed, be counted among the Natural Sciences.  While it is true that it does not depend on empirical verification of its conclusions, it is at least rooted in actual characteristics of the real world, with geometry starting from the characteristics and relationships of actual physical objects, and numbers and calculations connected to actual quantities and their actual combinatory relationships.  Furthermore, while mathematics formally divorced itself from correspondence to the physical world, it has proven remarkably able to model, and even predict, ever-more complex and subtle aspects of physical, and even social, reality.  Finally, it can be argued that mathematics does explore objectively real relationships, discovering ever more complex and subtle truths about the nature of numbers which, even if abstract, are lawful, not arbitrary in their nature and workings, manifestations of an intangible aspect of the natural order. 

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