Matt Michalik

Medieval Science
TA: Katie Barkus

Introduction
When new information is introduced into the scientific world, you must have proof
backing the information. Sometimes newly discovered sciences or even science that the world
has been studying for centuries can end up being wrong. Thats why experiments need to be
repeated over and over again to confirm that the results are a scientific paradigm. Before
starting an experiment one bust create a hypothesis. This is an educated guess, based on facts
and previous knowledge, to answer a scientific question. As time goes on and one hypothesis
becomes more and more confirmed, they can become theories. As more and more theories
emerge, they can start supporting each other and thats how a scientific paradigm is created.
Many different medieval sciences include alchemy, astrology, and folk belief. These
sciences did not make it into our modern science because most of the hypothesis created in
these sciences have been proven false. For example, in alchemy, alchemist believed that there
were only a couple elements that made up the universe, earth, air, water, and fire. Obviously
now we know that this is not true; therefore modern science has transitioned from alchemy to
chemistry. Astrology is the study that peoples lives on Earth are affected by the actions of
other celestial bodies. From these actions, many predicted the outcomes of different events.
Astrology used to be looked at as a well-respected practice and many people believed that
whatever astrologists said were going to come true. Today some people do still believe in it but
it is not as respected as it used to be. Astrologists used to look to the stars for answers and that
is how astronomy became the science it is today. The main difference between medieval

science and modern science is its reliability for making real-life predictions and having them
come true based off known information, proven hypothesis, and scientific paradigms. Medieval
sciences were not very reliable in making predictions, nowadays (modern science) we can make
better and more reliable predictions.

Methods
Our group completed two experiments to determine if our group as a whole was psychic
or not. The first experiment involved 25 different cards each with different shapes or designs on
them. There were 5 of each design (square, circle, triangle, straight lines, and squiggly lines).
The cards were shuffled and placed face down. Each of us would make 25 guesses as to what
the next card on top would be. The next test involved making astrological predictions based on
reading different peoples day and reading that days daily horoscopes. Our job was to match
up the persons astrological sign based on the horoscope predictions.
In my experiments, our null hypothesis was that everyone in our group (as a whole) is
psychic. We did two experiments to derive the results. We made predictions on the results
before the experiment and used a Chi-square test to figure out if we are psychic. The Chisquare test is written as

. The chi-squared value (2) is the compared against a

standardized set of values for different probabilities and degrees of freedoms. The degrees of
freedom relate to the number of different possibilities for your hypothesis (represented as N).
To calculate the degrees of freedom, take the number of possibilities for your hypothesis and
subtract 1. For this experiment, there are only 2 possibilities, either we are psychic or we arent
psychic. So our degrees of freedom would be 1 because 2-1=1. We also are measuring it with a
5% probability of being wrong. The Chi-square value for the expected outcome of the equation

should be 3.84 for someone that is not psychic. Since we hypothesize that we are psychic, we
expect that our value should be above the expected chi-square value of 3.84. The O value in the
equation represents the observed results that we got out of a total amount. The E value in the
equation represents the expected percentage of correct predictions for someone that is not
psychic. For the astrology predictions, there were a total of 8 possible predictions, we assumed
that a normal person would get about 30% of the predictions correct. For the card guessing
experiment we expected a normal person to get 5 out of the 25 cards correct. That is 20%
correct.
The calculations for the card experiment are:
Group Member

Expected

Actual

Total Possible

O value

E value

Matt

25

5/25

5/25

John

25

6/25

5/25

Nikki

25

4/25

5/25

Chi-Squared calculation

Matt

Nikki

John

[(

)]

For the 2nd experiment, we made predictions as a whole not individually. We made 2 correct
predictions. So for the O value in the equation it would be 2/8, and the expected (E) value
would be 0.3 because we expected that normal people would get 30% correct. The chi-squared
value for this experiment ended up being 0.008.

Results
Both of these experiments had chi-squared values way below the expected chi-squared
value to call us psychic, 3.84. The chi-squared value for the first experiment ended up being
0.016 and the second experiment came out to be 0.008. If the results for the experiment were
24 correct cards for each of us out of the 25 possible (an expected result for a psychic), the chisquared value would have been 8.664. This number is way above the 3.84 value, claiming that
our group as a whole was psychic. But since our values are way under, we can conclude that
our hypothesis was wrong and must be refuted. Therefore our group as a whole is not psychic.

References
http://www.alchemyandscience.com/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/