How do historians and scientists see and understand the past and its events differently?

Is this a homework question?

@Trillian It looks like it…“why and how” is suspicious, as well as the part “Both scientists and historians understand the past differently”...as if she already knew somehow that historians and scientists saw and understood the past differently but somehow didn’t know why.

Nevertheless @cristina__ I’ll try to answer your question.
Well…in my opinion, historians observe and sometimes try to use the past as an example that we have to change. Scientists, however, use the past as a reference to back up or enhance their knowledge and add more to it.

As much as I dislike to be like this, the lack of GAs and wording strongly indicate that this is a homework question.

For shame.

In other news, I strongly agree with @belakyre. However, I’d say historians study the past itself. Whereas scientists tend to both study past events as well as using them as backup.

how is it hw..then it would be formulated correctly which i agree it isn’t written properly. What I meant to write is….how do historians and science understand the past differently.. and yes that implies that they do, because I believe they do, seeing as for example historians use the past to figure out how human activities and behaviors relate to the environment in which the people lived while scientist will view this exact same time but use it to help them with their claim of how the world is today for example.. so they are both using the past but understand it differently if that makes sense…

Says who? Scientists study the same history, historians study the same science. One could even make an argument that historians are scientists.

Well, what to you think?

Let’s not go too much back in time and focus on World War II.Historians see it as an event ranging over a period of 6 years of time way from 1939–1945.They record a series of events chronologically like emergence of Germany,the immediate causes,Formation of allied forces,Pearl harbor attack,D-day and finally everyone knows so, I don’t wanna mention how it ended.The historians focus on the cause of events,the course of the event and the effect the events that took place during a particular period of time.
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Where as,scientists are more or less involved in the techinical aspects more than keeping records of the event.For example,the first computer was invented at University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering in the year 1943.It was developed for calculation of precision target for Hydrogen Bombs and other missiles.Niel Bhor made a break through in his nuclear theory and many weapons of mass deatrustion were deviced draining huge investments.When scientists look back in time,what they do is a sort of comparison of computer at that time it seems to them as a brilliant achievement which has a lot of scope of improvement.It as a single purpose hardcoded program and it wasn’t programmable,but it paved way for researchers and scientists to make a break-through in the field of programmable computing and make it multipurpose and as a result,we have the cyber revolution now.
Historians might see it as a catastrophic event, but scientist see it as a event that was a breakthough for further progress.

@Snarp its not about how scientist and historians use the same history its how they understand it differently..

@cristina__ I still think it is inconsequential.

@cristina__ Your example: “historians use the past to figure out how human activities and behaviors relate to the environment in which the people lived while scientist will view this exact same time but use it to help them with their claim of how the world is today for example” I find to be inaccurate. Historians just as much as scientists view the past as controlling how the world is today. What I find troubling about this statement, and perhaps it was unintended, is that it sounds like a lead in to a general attack on science.

But I’ll try to get at the only difference I can see making sense. Academically, in terms of actual research and publication, physical scientists and historians ask fundamentally different questions and use fundamentally different methods to answer them. Historians are interested in how human civilization got to where it is now through it’s own actions, while physical scientists are interested in how some physical process works in the world, independent of the development of civilization. They might ask how humans have affected a certain process, but it’s not about how and why humans went from the horse drawn carriage to the internal combustion automobile, but rather about what chemical properties of gasoline engine exhaust are doing to atmospheric processes.

These different questions result in different methods: historians analyze written (or recorded) records of past events, seeking out first person sources when possible, to determine what events occurred and how contemporary people interpreted those events and using this information to formulate an interpretation of what motivated those past individuals and what the long term effects of their decisions was.

Physical scientists, on the other hand, perform discrete experiments to determine how things happened in the past in some physical process, and make the reasonable assumption (because it has never been falsified) that the same physical processes and the same chemical reactions happen now that happened fifty million years ago. The half life of Carbon isotopes does not change. The reactivity of hydrogen and oxygen does not change. So scientists can look at what chemicals existed in the past, as recored in rocks and fossils, and accurately extrapolate what physical processes were involved with those chemicals. Or they can look at a set of bones found together and determine that there are a limited number of ways those bones could have been pieced together in a particular organism and how that organism could have moved (because gravity and other physical laws have not changed in 65 million years).

What my examples point out is that physical scientists and historians tend to deal with entirely different time scales. Physical scientists may be interested in what happened millions or even billions of years ago, or they may be interested in comparing the atmospheric concentration of sulfur dioxide from thirty years ago with the present concentration.

Historians, on the other hand, may deal with fairly recent events, but as a whole are interested in the finite timespan in which written human history exists, that is between about 5000 B.C and the present.

The historian’s job is to tell stories based on evidence. The hard scientist’s job is to find physical evidence. There are areas where the two jobs blur—anthropology is a good example.

The standards for the evidence are different. A historian is usually interested in human-created evidence. The hard scientist goes for any physical evidence.

They interpret differently. If a hard scientist found an old tool, he might try to figure out what material it was made from and how it was used and how old it was. A historian looking at the same old tool might be interested in figuring out why is was used in that particular place at that particular time, and what the impact of its use was on the culture and history of that particular group of people.

History of technology, my field, is looking at both areas. Why were certain technological options chosen? What were the consequences? What can we learn from this? How can we apply this knowlege to the future?

Historians in and of themselves dont agree, nor do scientists. EVERYTHING is debatable

@Ruallreb8ters of course this is true, but that can be said about everything. I really mean to focus on the differences between historians and scientist how they can both understand an event differently and why this may be..