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The natural sciences include chemistry, biology, earth sciences, astronomy, and physics, with transversal disciplines like biophysics. They have led to advances in medicine, food production, and industry. The social sciences rely more on qualitative assessments, while the formal sciences are strongly quantitative but do not involve natural phenomena.
The natural sciences are one of the three major divisions of science, the other two being the social sciences and the formal sciences. Chemistry, biology, earth sciences, astronomy and physics are all part of the natural sciences. There are also transversal disciplines, such as biophysics, which integrate different aspects of several subjects. Prior to the 17th century, these disciplines were often referred to as “natural philosophy” and lacked the kinds of experiments and procedures used today.
Chemistry
Much of what defines modern civilization comes from advances in knowledge and technology brought about by investigations in the natural sciences and chemistry. For example, modern food production can be traced back to the Haber-Bosch process which was developed during World War I. This chemical process allows for the creation of nitrate fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen, rather than relying on biologically fixed sources of nitrogen such as cow dung, significantly increasing the amount of food produced by various countries.
Biology and Medicine
Thanks to developments in biology, especially those of the 20th century, doctors can use advanced medicines to treat or cure many diseases that were previously fatal. Through research in biology and medicine, scourges of the 19th century and earlier, such as plague and smallpox, have largely been brought under control. Perhaps more importantly, infant and maternal mortality rates in industrialized nations have declined dramatically. The biological subfield of genetics has even allowed scientists to understand the very code of life and to recognize how it expresses itself within each person.
Earth Science
Advances in earth sciences have enabled mankind to extract vast quantities of minerals and oil from the earth’s crust, fueling the engines of modern civilization and industry. Paleontology, a subfield of earth sciences, provides a window into Earth’s distant past, long before humans existed. Through discoveries in geology and similar fields within the natural sciences, scientists are able to better understand the history of the planet and predict the changes it may undergo in the future.
Astronomy and Physics
Physics is, in many respects, the science that underlies all other natural sciences and has yielded some of the most unexpected revelations of the 20th century. Among the most notable of these was the discovery that matter and energy are constant and simply transfer from one state to another. Through astronomy, scientists have discovered a huge amount of information about the universe. In previous centuries, the entire universe was thought to be just the Milky Way galaxy, until a series of debates and observations in the 20th century revealed that the universe is literally millions of times larger than previously imagined. .
Different kinds of science
The establishment of the scientific method in the 1600s and the resulting scientific revolution helped create modern science. The natural sciences are often referred to as the “hard sciences” due to the heavy use of objective data and quantitative methods that are based on numbers and mathematics. In contrast, the social sciences, such as psychology, sociology and anthropology, rely more on qualitative, or non-numerical, assessments and tend to have less certain conclusions. The formal sciences, including mathematics and statistics, are strongly quantitative in nature, but do not typically involve the study of natural phenomena or experimentation.
