Horse and MDers,
HORSE:
Maybe I missed it in your post but could you state exactly what it is YOU
mean by the
Scientific Method. That might seem odd but I'm sure there are a number of
people who will
otherwise be confused.
OK. What I mean by the scientific method is the conventional definition.
The method is a simple, iterative procedure that leads people to understand
how a phenomena in nature works. It does this by successively eliminating
wrong ideas about how the phenomena works until a promising idea is found,
at which point the method is used to refine the promising idea even
further. The promising idea will be called a theory.
The method starts by making a guess of how the phenomena works, which is
what the fancy word "hypothesis" means.
1. Make a hypothesis
Then you devise an experiment that will prove your hypothesis wrong if the
experiment turns out a certain way. If you cannot think of a way to devise
such an experiment, your hypothesis might be right or wrong, but you'll
never be too sure one way or the other. Such a hypothesis might be outside
the bounds of science and fall under philosophy or religion, or just be
technically infeasible.
2. Devise an experiment to test the hypothesis
3. Run the experiment
If the experiment falsifies the hypothesis (proves it wrong), you go back
to #1 and think up a new hypothesis or adjust your current one in some way
and re-devise, retest, etc.
If your experiment cannot disprove the hypothesis, then it has promise,
but it's far from certain. A careful investigator will rerun the
experiment many times to ensure it is not a fluke. If it still holds up,
parameters of this experiment are changed, but only one at a time, and
these are tested to see the effect they have on the phenomena. Examples of
parameters might be pressure, speed, temperature, volume, or time. You
find that the phenomena is sensitive to certain parameters, and not others.
Eventually a pretty good picture emerges of how the phenomena works.
An important part of science, but not the scientific method per se, is
that investigators publish their results along with a description of the
experiments that led them to these results. This allows other scientists
the opportunity to run the experiments themselves and either verify or
discredit the conclusions. For example, the claims about cold fusion back
in the 1980s were discredited this way.
Glenn
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