MATHEMATICS

"...Mathematics is fundamental to our lifestyle. How many people, watching a television program, realise that without mathematics there would be nothing to watch?

Mathematics was a crucial ingredient in the discovery of radio waves. It controls the design of electronic circuits that process the signals.

When the picture on the screen rolls up into a tube and spins off to reveal another picture, the quantity of mathematics that has come to life as computer graphics is staggering.
...The last few years have witnessed a remarkable re-unification of pure and applied mathematics.

Topology is opening up entire new areas of dynamics; the geometry of multi-dimensional ellipsoids is minting money for AT&T; obscure items such as p-adic groups turn up in the design of efficient telephone networks; and the Cantor set describes how your heart works..."

Engineering courses focus on the principles, methods and applications in their particular branch of Engineering (Aeronautical, Mechanical, Electrical/Electronic, Civil or Computing); Engineering Mathematics provides the mathematical foundations for all of these as well as areas of application in Medicine and the Social Sciences.

Objective Experimentation and Observation.

Science depends heavily on the repeatability of experiments, and on their giving consistent (e.g. almost identical) results. This repeatability hinges on objective comparison of observations of different researchers studying the phenomenon.

Objectivity indicates the desire to observe things as they are, without manipulating the observational results to accord with some preconceived world view. All observation is potentially contaminated, whether by our theories or our worldview or our past experiences.

Scientists, like anyone else, may be swayed by some preconceptions to look for certain experimental results rather than others. Scientists are people and suffer the flaws of humanity too, and it cannot truthfully be said that every scientific theory has arisen from a perfectly executed process of 'scientific method'.

Scientists have desires, opinions, and biases that may sometimes influence them in the selection of their data and hypotheses - even, very ocasionally, to the point of fraudulence. We trust that this is very rare, and that science is a self-correcting process with checks and balances - such as empirical replication, and peer reviews of published work. The scientific community as a whole, however, judges the work of its members by the objectivity and rigor with which that work has been conducted.

An infamous example of an experiment that couldn't be repeated to give the same results again, involved "cold fusion" - a supposed process by which nuclear fusion could be achieved at room temperatures instead of the extremely high temperatures normally needed for fusion to occur. The researchers involved in the original experiment were found to have been less than objective in their methods.