Observation

When a plague closed the University in the summer of 1665, and an isolation order was given, Isaac Newton returned to Lincolnshire to his farm Woolsthorpe, about sixty miles north of the university. 

As biographer Richard Westfall documented in his book “Never at Rest,” Newton started to think about the most pressing questions in science while in his rooms at Trinity College during the year before the plague struck. 

A document written in Newton’s hand lists the problems that he was trying to solve. Among them, as Westfall writes, “Matter, place, time, and motion…the cosmic order, then…light, colours, vision,” and the list continued with other questions that he thought he would pursue for the next two decades.

During his nearly two years on the farm, isolating from the plaque, Newton produced an unbelievable number of exceptional results. 

It was in near total solitude, he would co-invent calculus, analytical geometry, formulate the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which was the dominant scientific viewpoint until it was superseded by the theory of relativity. 

He performed experiments to measure gravity’s pull, and also stuck a needle in his own eye as part of his quest to understand how light and lenses work. 

While sitting in the garden on the farm one day, he saw an apple fall from a tree, which inspired his law of universal gravitation. 

In 2010, a NASA astronaut carried a piece of that same ancient apple tree aboard the space shuttle Atlantis for a mission to the International Space Station. 

The Royal Society, a scientific organisation once headed by Newton, loaned the piece of the tree for the voyage, as part of a celebration of the 350th anniversary of the group’s founding. 

Today, the original apple tree continues to grow at Woolsthorpe Manor.

Newton discovered gravity through first being curious and inquisitive, asking questions, then through close observation, looking and finding some answers.

Newton started into the abyss often, where others considered him as uninterested and aloof, he was merely contemplating the problems he wanted to solve… thinking…

He famously said, “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results. Truth, is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait ’til the first dawning opens slowly, little by little, into a full and clear light.”

Observation is the active acquisition of information from a primary source, and the process of filtering sensory information through the thought process. 

Input is received via hearing, sight, smell, taste, or touch and then analysed through either rational or irrational thought.

With the passage of time, impressions stored in the consciousness, together with the resulting relationships and consequences, permit the individual to construct implications or behaviour.

In living beings, observation employs the senses. In science, observation can also involve the perception and recording of data via the use of scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any data collected during the scientific activity. 

Observations can be qualitative, that is, only the absence or presence of a property is noted, or quantitative if a numerical value is attached to the observed phenomenon by counting or measuring. The scientific method requires observations of natural phenomena to formulate and test hypotheses. 

But human senses are limited and subject to errors in perception, such as optical illusions. So Newton had to prove his observation in practice with the scientific method.

One problem encountered throughout scientific fields, is that the observation may affect the process being observed, resulting in a different outcome than if the process was unobserved. This is called the observer effect.

Observational learning is learning that occurs through observing the behaviour of others. It is a form of social learning which takes various forms, based on various processes. 

In humans, this form of learning seems to not need reinforcement to occur, but instead, requires a social model such as a parent, sibling, friend, or teacher with surroundings. Particularly in childhood, a model is someone of authority or higher status in an environment.

Albert Bandura claims that children continually learn desirable and undesirable behaviour through observational learning. Observational learning suggests that an individual’s environment, cognition, and behaviour all incorporate and ultimately determine how the individual functions and models.

The child observes mother and father, and learns more from that, than from what comes from their speech. Observational learning occurs through observing negative and positive behaviours. A child may learn to swear, smack, smoke, and deem other inappropriate behaviour acceptable through poor modelling. 

Through observational learning, individual behaviours can spread across a culture through a process called diffusion chain. This basically occurs when an individual first learns a behaviour by observing another individual and that individual serves as a model through whom other individuals learn the behaviour, and so on.

Culture plays a role in whether observational learning is the dominant learning style in a person or community. Some cultures expect children to actively participate in their communities and are therefore exposed to different trades and roles on a daily basis. This exposure allows children to observe and learn the different skills and practices that are valued in their communities.