4 The Scientific Method

It is a common misconception that the scientific method is series of steps that scientists use to prove a hypothesis either correct or incorrect.  Imagine a common junior high science project.  Two near-identical plants are planted in identical soil under identical light.  One is watered daily, one is not.  The one that is watered thrives, the other does not.  This proves the student’s hypothesis that plants need water to live, right?

Wrong. What if the plants were cacti, the experiment didn’t last very long, and the one that was watered died? Does this prove that water kills plants? What if someday, on a cold, distant world, we find a way to make plants grow with liquid methane? What if we find the plant version of a tardigrade, capable of suspending itself for indefinitely long periods of time in the absence of light, air, or water?

These questions might seem juvenile, trivial, or beside the point, but they get at the nature of science. However well-tested any theory might be, the Universe is large and full of extreme conditions, and our theories might break down under some of them.

So if the scientific method isn’t a set of steps that allow us to determine whether or not a hypothesis is correct, then what is it? At heart, it’s a philosophy of knowledge, but we can keep it simple for the moment.

The scientific method is the way that we, as a species, learn something that we didn’t know before. That something might be complicated or limited or need to be revised in the future, but for the moment, it represents the state of the art in knowing.

Two of the most important, and difficult to understand, concepts that are central to the scientific method are falsifiability and confidence.