The Nature of Science

Scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical, measurable evidence, subject to the principles of reasoning.
--Isaac Newton

Many of us, if we've attended school, have had to participate at least once in our lives. Some enjoyed it, some lived for it, others hated it. The Science Fair. You were asked to select a topic, an area of science. You studied it, recorded what you found, compiled your findings into a presenation (usually on a tri-fold board), and set up your booth at the fair for your classmates and parents to see, and your teachers and possibly some community scientists to judge.

Do you remember how you went about putting your science project together? Hopefully you followed the Scientific Method, a pocess by which one states a question (a.k.a. hypothesis), designs an experiment to answer the question,
Even laws can be proven wrong as new or additional information is gathered.
and evaluates the results of the experiment. Science is the study of the observable and repeatable, so once one conducts his experiment, he repeats (sometimes more than once) the experiment to determine if his results were by chance, or because of an underlying inherent fact or law that made the results so.

For example, one might hypothesize the following: "Tomato plants will grow taller when exposed to sunlight on a daily basis than tomato plants that are kept in a box and not exposed to sunlight."

The experiment to prove this hypothesis would be set up as follows: Five or so tomato plants would be set in a greenhouse where they can be exposed to sunlight every day, and five or so plants would be set in box and closed from the sunlight. The rest of the variables would be controlled, and all of the plants would receive the same amount of water and the soil used would be consistent for all ten plants.
The public is woefully undereducated when it comes to science and the scientific method.
At the end of a set amount of time, the plants would be measured, and the original hypothesis would be proved or disproved.

While likely not discussed at the elementary level, but which is a vital component of the scientific method, is that those participating in science and the scientific method must remain objective. It defeats the purpose of determining what is observable and repeatable if the scientist incorporates bias into his experiment. This may make his experiments repeatable, however when another scientist attmepts to conduct the same experiment, the results will only be repeated if scientist #2 follows the same bias.

Similarly, there is no voting in science. A theory is not advanced to a law because a majority of scientists elect the law. Rather, a law becomes a law when, over the course of time and through many scientists following the scientific method, the scientific method proves that the hypothesis is an unarguable fact. Examples of this include Newton's law of gravitation, the laws of Thermodynamics, and Boyle's Law. However, it must also be stated, that even laws can be proven wrong if new or additional information is gathered that conflicts with the findings of the law. This is significant: very little, if anything, in the realm of science is off-limits to question and scrutiny.

This is what needs to be understood, but regretfully gets very little "air-time." The public is woefully undereducated when it comes to science and the scientific method. For instance, if the public had a reasonable scientific background they would be able to watch with a skeptical eye when the lawyer blames the doctor for causing cerebral palsy in a child by not performing a Caesarian section. But because this scare was believed and has become conventional wisdom in some circles, C-sections have grown exponentially (a built-in experiment) but the rate of cerebral palsy has not declined at nearly the expected rate.

Need a second example? If the public had a foundation in the scientific method they would wonder how the junk science in the media could prop up the current global warming theory: that the current upward trend in global temperatures is both man-made and a harbinger of apocolyptic doomsday. Yes, the increased temperatures are observable, which is half of science. However, neither conclusions are observable and repeatable, which is the foundation of science.

Need a third example? When it comes to stem cell cures, what is observable and repeatable is that cures and treatments are being developed every day from the use of adult stem cell research (one example, more examples). What is also observable and repeatable is that nothing has been produced in terms of cures or treatments from the use of embryonic stem cell research. This is neither the time, nor the place to debate the specifics of stem cell research (this was addressed previously on XEKE.com), but it is the time and the place to say that Americans would do well to apply science and the scientific method to issues that involve science, such as all that stem cell research involves.