What Is Science?

What's the best way to see how "hard" a science is versus "soft"? Could it be useful for Science/Tech?

• I'm curious because different people are trying to find out what separates the softer sciences from the hard, because it could be "useful knowledge" to apply to science and technology. When people think of "creativity" many think of entertainment or sense of humor creativity. However, there's another type, when people come up with new discoveries in science, or scientific creativity. I wonder if finding the "real" difference between softer and harder sciences may help with this? Just like Galileo tried to test others' ideas, some researchers will actually try to make Philosophy of Science ideas falsifiable by finding ways to quantitatively measure these ideas by using random selection of peer-review journal articles from the different sciences to "find any correlations". For example, some say mathematics separate the natural vs. social sciences since Newton used mathematical models, however there's a weak 0.1 correlation between using equations and how "hard" raters rate a science (for example the field of economics uses more mathematical models in their peer-review articles than physics does). I know this "hardness" scale averaged out from many raters was tested by checking correlation with a "ratio of laws to theories" results for introductory textbooks. Since Galileo tested ideas, I want to test other peoples' ideas about "Science" for myself, so I was wondering ways to "examine" all this? I was thinking I could write the National Academy of Sciences and ask them to rate each science on a scale of 1-100 for hardness, then see how these ratings compare to the ratings this peer-review study used for their correlations. The study used physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, psychology, economics, and sociology. In your personal opinion, do you think writing the National Academy of Sciences individual members to have them rate would be a reliable way to test, or would there be a better method? This is the study I'm trying to use critical thinking on to test for myself : http://www.flickr.com/photos/29759797@N07/4354810741/ Then three other graphs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29759797@N07/4355556948/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/29759797@N07/4354810825/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/29759797@N07/4354810861/

• Answer:

  use the Pearson's chi square test