Comparison of Historical Science and Operational Science Essay

Historical Science

Historical science can be described as using the knowledge that is already in the public domain to explain a past phenomenon. Historical science aims at explaining historical origins of specific objects or occurrences. Various scholars have described historical science as a field of science that requires making educated assumptions about the past by studying and closely examining evidence of a subject drawn from the past. Historical science is also referred to as the original science.

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Operational Science

Operational science is the branch of science that systematically studies the behavior and structure of the physical world. Simply described, it is the branch of science that deals with testing and verifying present ideas and enables the production of commodities like satellites and computers.

The Differences

Operational science includes chemistry, modern technology, engineering, hydraulics, physics, and chemistry while operational science entails the fields of archaeology, paleontology, forensics, and Geology. The distinctiveness between operational and historical sciences is that operational deals with the modern aspects of science while historical deals with the old time's aspect of science.

Operational science sets out to showcase how something works explaining every minute detail about the process of the subject in question, which could be a modern physical or chemical process, while historical science attempts to make sense or meaning of a traditional occurrence, process or object (Robson, McCartan, 2016).

A major difference between these two types of science is that theories in historical science cannot be tested and are laced with assumptions and deductive conclusions while on the contrary, theories governing operational science are usually testable, and most of them have been proved through various scientific experiments.

Examples of historical science are; sampling evidence of a giant meteor that hit the earth millions of years ago to establish how life on earth started and examining bones of dinosaurs to establish how they came to be in existence. On the other hand, examples of operational sciences include the making processes of astronomy that is rocket science and technological devices such as Phones and computers (Buss, 2015).

Why Historical Science is more controversial than Operational

Historical science involves more controversy than the operational science. This is because the processes in operational science can be tested and verified to establish whether they are factual. On the contrary, theories developed by historical science are not verifiable and therefore cannot be said to be accurate and without any doubt.

References

Buss, D. (2015). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind. Psychology Press.

Robson, C., & McCartan, K. (2016). Real world research. John Wiley & Sons.