Study Guides | a. appendix | The Scientific Method

Study Guide: The Scientific Method

Choosing What To Believe

We live in a complex world. It’s not easy to know what is true. In all the confusion, we can easily believe things that may not be true. We are constantly influenced by unconscious assumptions, anecdotal stories, wishful thinking, clever arguments, well-phrased half-truths, appeals to authority, and “big lies” repeated too often. The scientific method is one of humanity’s best attempts to discover real truth within all the confusion. But how the method work, and how do we know we should rely on it.

The scientific method does not automatically make prejudice, bias and confusion disappear. We still need to do our own honest and careful thinking Statements such as “scientists say”, “science has proven”, or “three out of four scientists believe” should be viewed with skepticism. Although they speak of scientists, they are not scientific statements. In science, only the evidence counts.

Specialization

Not all scientists know what they are talking about. Scientists make mistakes too. If someone says, “three out of four scientists believe that global warming is not caused by human activity,” we need to check their evidence. We may also need to know their qualifications and area of expertise. In this case, we might prefer to hear from meteorologists who have devoted their lives to developing a better understanding of climate and weather.

Specialization, (the practice of studying one subject very deeply), does not automatically make someone’s ideas correct, but it does seem to gradually reduce our level of ignorance.

Steps in the Scientific Method

1. Surprise and Wonder: A scientist has a surprising or interesting experience and begins to wonder about it.
2. Questions: The scientist starts asking questions…
   1. What just happened?
   2. Why did that happen?
   3. Will it happen again?
   4. Does it always happen when that other thing happens?
   5. Does it only happen when that other thing happens?
   6. Will it happen if I try this…
3. Hypothesis: The scientist develops an hypothesis in an attempt to find answers to her questions.
4. Experimentation: The scientist develop experiments to test if the hypothesis is true or not. As she learns more, she develops new questions, refines her hypothesis, and creates more helpful experiments.
5. Analysis and Conclusion: Sometimes the experiments show that the hypothesis was a reasonable explanation. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, something may be learned.
6. Publication and Independent Verification: When the scientist believe she has learned something worth reporting to the wider scientific community, she writes a research paper, which includes the hypothesis, experimental methods, data, observations, and conclusions. The research report must be honest, factual, and mathematically exact so that others can repeat the experiments and independently verify the results.
7. Scientific Acceptance: When many scientists have duplicated the experiment and confirmed that the results support the conclusion, the discovery may be added to humanity’s ever-growing collection of scientific knowledge.

Scientific Laws vs. Theories

What is the difference between a theory and a law?

A law describes what always happens in certain conditions. For example, “On Earth, the sun always rises in the east.”

A theory describes why something always happens in certain conditions. For example, “The sun appears to rise in the east because the planet Earth is rotating toward the east.”

Universal Laws

Very rarely, someone makes a discovery so fundamental to our understanding of reality that we call it a Universal Law. Here are several of the greatest universal laws:

1. Newton’s first law of motion
2. Newton’s second law of motion
3. Newton’s law of universal gravitation
4. The law of conservation of mass
5. The law of conservation of energy
6. The law of conservation of momentum

Here’s a good page explaining some of the most important scientific theories and laws.

• 10 Scientific Laws and Theories You Really Should Know

Exploring the Unknown

Real science has more to say about what is not known than about what is known. For example, although physics is the study of all physical phenomenon, there are only a few scientific laws that physicists are certain must be true. Everything else is conjecture and open to exploration…

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

Alfred North Whitehead was a brilliant and complex philosopher. His books are not easy reading, and so are rarely read, and even more rarely understood.

One of the easier ideas to understand is his Fallacy fo Misplaced Concreteness, which in these times has become a potent weapon against the false claims of pseudo-science, as well as neo-liberal/fascist economic theories.

Here are a few tidbits from Alfred North Whitehead:

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”

“[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, which is the error of mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality."

“While the aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations for complex facts, we can fall into the error of thinking that facts are simple because simplicity is the goal.”

“The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, ‘Seek simplicity and distrust it.’”

“In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.”

“Error is the price we pay for progress.”