How Science Makes Sense of the Natural & Designed World
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Loading... - Bertrand Herve
- 06 Sep 2022
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What is science and how does it work? Learn what it is that has made science so successful, and the impact that has had on our lives. When you're done, take a quiz and see how much you know.
What is Science?
Science is the study of the universe, with the goal of figuring out how it works. And we have a lot to thank science for. Without science we wouldn't have televisions, computers, ventilators in hospitals, cars, cameras, cell phones. In fact practically everything around you is an application of scientific knowledge. The better we understand the universe, the more we are able to manipulate it to get things that we want to happen.
But let's go a bit deeper into what science actually is. Science is the practical and intellectual pursuit that involves the study of the natural world through a systematic process of experimentation and observation. What makes science so great is all about the process, and that process is called the scientific method.
The Scientific Method
The scientific method is the process scientists use to understand the natural world and how it works. In a nutshell, the goal is to find a way to get around the fact that our brains are terrible at being objective and consistent. The only thing consistent about the human brain is its ability to make guesses and have feelings about things that often turn out to be completely wrong. So how do we fix that? We fix it with checklists and processes and systems that make it harder for us to mess up.
The scientific method has several stages:
1. ask a question about the world,
2. come up with a hypothesis,
3. test that hypothesis with an experiment,
4. analyze the data to see if you were right,
5. if you weren't, go back and make a new hypothesis.
This process repeats until there is little to no doubt that you have found the truth. You can also communicate your findings to the world after each experiment, or at the end when you've got to the bottom of it.
For example, maybe you want to figure out what kind of chocolate bar causes the most lethargy later in the day. Your hypothesis is that milk chocolate bars will be worse than dark chocolate. So you come up with an experiment to test it: you randomly assign home-made chocolate bars to volunteers. It's not hard to find people to help, because everyone loves chocolate.
Next, you have them rate their sluggishness for seven days without eating chocolate, and seven days where they do. You analyze your data, and the darkness of the chocolate seems to make no difference. So you come up with a new hypothesis: if it isn't the darkness of the chocolate, maybe it's the sugar! You go back and design a new experiment. And on you go.
The Scientific Method
How do you know when you've found the truth? Well, there are a number of things that help. One is statistics. We can use statistics to analyze our data and figure out how likely it is that our results were just a fluke. This is called the confidence interval. If we have a strong confidence interval, our results are more likely to be accepted by people. Read More...
