The Scientific Process

Principles of Ecology
A Brief Look at the Scientific Process

Science is both a process and a collection of information. The common perception of science is the latter - that it is the knowledge that we have gained of how our universe is structured and how it functions. This, although important, is not the most important aspect of what really constitutes science. The most important aspect of science is the process of gaining information. This is because if we lost knowledge we could get it back using the scientific process. If the method is gone we will learn little more. Interestingly, we all use this process in our daily lives without even realizing it. Therefore, think of science primarily as the way we get information and less about what we know.

You are probably familiar with the steps involved when you employ the scientific method. This, therefore, should be review. But you may not have thought about science as something you do everyday. Therefore, we can better understand science using an everyday sort of problem. Keep in mind that the purpose of the scientific process is to reveal something about how the natural world operates. Here is my formulation of the steps to the scientific method:

Observation
Hypothesis
Prediction
Experiment to test a "null" hypothesis
Data reduction
Interpretation/Inference
Conclusion

Upon drawing a conclusion a scientist either stops and hopefully publishes the results or treats the experimental results as a new form of observation and returns to the beginning of the process. The process is not without end but may end without interesting conclusions.

Let’s get to an example of this process that may relate to your life. You jump in your car to come to class. You insert the key in the ignition and turn it. Nothing happens. You don’t even get a clicking sound. Nothing. You may jump out of the car and run to class and think little of this inconvenience, but you might decide to try to solve the problem with your car. How do you do this? It turns out that most of you employ the scientific method. You don't have to - you could use a problem solving method other than the scientific method. For instance, you could kneel by the car and attempt to summon various spirits to help rid the car of demons. This may be the fundamental cure to your car's problem. This, however, is not the scientific approach, our currently favored technique in Western Civilization used to understand how the world functions. Instead, let’s explore the scientific method and apply it to our car's problem.

We have made our observation that the car does not start. Our next step is to construct a hypothesis. We, perhaps, hypothesize that there is no energy passing between the battery and the ignition system. This is a testable hypothesis that makes sense considering there was no sound made by turning the key. The null hypothesis would be that the battery connection has nothing to do with why the car does not start. If we "do something" to the battery connector cables and the car starts we reject our null hypothesis and accept our alternative hypothesis that there was problem with the battery.

We make the prediction that, if our null hypothesis is wrong, the car will start after "manipulating" the connectors. So, to test our hypothesis we conduct an experiment. An experiment is an action that manipulates our system enabling us to better understand how the system works. A good experiment is designed to specifically test our null hypothesis. Our experiment, therefore, may be to hit the battery connectors with a hammer to jar loose the corrosion. We must always keep in mind our null hypothesis (the connectors are not our problem!). We smack the cable connectors - POW! We then get in the car and see if it will start. Let’s assume it is my car and it, of course, does not start. "Failure to start" represents the datum from our experiment (one bit of information = datum; more than one bit of information = data). We interpret our result and conclude that our null hypothesis appears to be correct. We, therefore, tentatively accept that the battery connectors are not the problem.

That is an example of using the scientific method, a process we actually use in everyday activities to understand what is going on around us. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, it is possible that our conclusions are wrong. This may occur due to a failure at any one of the steps of the process. For instance, we may find out from a real auto mechanic that the connection of the cables to the battery were in fact the problem. It turns out that my example above is as very weak test of the hypothesis that our problem lies with the battery connectors. I, for example, did not replicate this experiment (try it several times or line up a bunch of other similarly dead cars and wonk on their battery connectors), which always is a good thing to do in a manipulative experiment such as this (I whacked the connectors). Keep in mind that not all experiments are manipulative, however. "Natural experiments" often cannot be replicated. Examples of these include the 1988 Yellowstone fires that burned some areas but not others or the "disturbance" caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens.

Science is "self correcting." Now it gets more complicated. It is possible to be wrong and have the right answer surface later (we concluded the battery cables were not a problem when they were - smacking the cables was not a sufficient test of our hypothesis). This is because we can get new data or we may change our inference about the data we had. We could give up on our car, take it to a mechanic who knows something, and have her tells us that the cable connectors suffered from corrosion. Aha! We got to the answer despite being inept. An example of science as a self-correcting process.

Another rather tricky characteristic of science is that the results should be falsifiable. This idea, introduced by Karl Popper, states that we must be able to conduct a test that produces a different outcome from our original experiment. A good example of an experiment that turned out not to be falsifiable was the production of energy at room temperature. This experiment, termed "cold fusion," was later discarded because it was not repeatable. The scientists who claimed to have succeeded at producing energy at room temperature using deuterium claimed that others' attempts at repeating their experiment failed to produce energy because they were not conducting their experiments properly. This went on for many months with the original authors making the same claim - everyone else's' experiments were just not be done correctly. No one replicated their results. The possibility of yielding energy via cold fusion using their technique became vanishingly small and the idea, although interesting and important if true, was eventually discarded. Scientists must be able to correctly conduct any experiment and turn up conflicting results. Claiming that inconsistent results demonstrates incorrect methods is not satisfactory.

The eventual failure and abandonment of the cold fusion idea also represents the self-correcting characteristic of science. Bad science, especially if it involves important issues, will be scrutinized and exposed. Occasionally, scientists overlook ideas that seem obviously true without evidence, but these, too, will be exposed over time. Two interesting examples of this include the 100 year old "belief" that Viceroy butterflies were tasty mimics of the distasteful Monarch butterfly. Most ecology text books propagated this idea without citing any specific test of the claim. It turns out Viceroys and Monarchs are both distasteful to birds. A second example is that people have believed glass windows flow very slowly, or sag, due to their low viscosity (glass has properties quite similar to liquids). This seems reasonable since many old windows are or seem thicker at their bottoms than tops. The truth is that, after examining 12th century stained glassed windows, researchers recently concluded that even the oldest, poorest quality glass has not flowed due to gravity (see Science News article).

Science is mainly a process. You use it daily just to get by. From this process we get information about how the universe is structured and how it functions. The steps in the scientific process are relatively orderly but the discoveries often can be surprising.