Questionnaires are often used in medical research to find out what people know or believe. Studies based on questionnaires can be very informative but need to be read critically. https://oncologypro.esmo.org/Meeting-Resources/ESMO-2017-Congress/European-survey-of-907-people-with-cancer-about-the-importance-of-nutrition is a report presented at a meeting of the European Society for Medical Oncology. It concludes that most of the people with cancer who participated… Continue reading 20.4 Questionnaires and response rates

Before you read this, I suggest you read post 20.2. Hooke’s law is named after the English scientist and architect Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Most textbooks give the impression that Hooke’s law is important for understanding how objects deform when subjected to tensile stress. If you continue to read this post, you will see that I… Continue reading 20.3 Hooke’s law

Forces change the state of motion of an object (post 16.13). But, in post 16.50 on springs, we saw that forces could also change the dimensions of objects. A spring can be stretched by a force (a tensile force) or compressed by a force (a compressive force). This effect is not restricted to springs –… Continue reading 20.2 Deformation of objects – stress, strain and Young’s modulus

This post was prompted by something written in the art magazine Universal Colours (http://www.eu-man.org/magazine/issue903.df). The article states that, “Modern science uses mathematics … for proving … suppositions in science”. Mathematics is not used to prove scientific ideas; it is used to develop new ideas from ideas that we believe to be true. This is not… Continue reading 20.1 Mathematical proof and science