This post is not about Astronomy only, but the general science approach to all things. I promise I wouldn’t write too many of such posts, but it is a personal blog, and there are some things I want to share with others.
Talking to people I noticed that those who are far from science think in a very different way then I do, so I decided to explain how scientists think and study the world around us. If you are not into science you could notice that sometimes it’s hard to explain something to the stubborn sceptic, but the truth is if you do believe strongly in something it does not make it proved in scientific mind, the way scientific mind works is different.
This is a Hollywood mad scientist stereotype. Image from: wikimedia
First we observe something around us. Let’s say we see how apple falls from the tree. What do you think when you see it? Probably “m-m-m ripe apple” or something like this :-). What does scientist think? “Why did apple fall down?” most likely. After observation comes the hypothesis. You can think of any possible reason for apple to fall down — they all will be hypotheses. Let me come up with some. Apple felt down, because:
- It is July, apples always fall down in July
- I was thinking of apple just 1 hour ago, if you think of apple really hard then one falls down from the nearby tree
- All bodies with mass attract to each other
Now we have three different hypotheses. At this point of research all of them are equally true. This is how science mind works, it’s trying to be objective. I will not tell you that first two are total absurd, because I don’t have any proof of it yet. When they say that some scientists are stubborn and close minded, it all comes from the lack of evidence. Scientists are very open minded, they love to believe that there are aliens out there and sunk Atlantis on the ocean bottom, but they don’t say it, because they don’t have evidence of it, that’s all. They will be very glad to find one, so instead of trying to convince a science man, give him evidence and he’ll agree with you right away.
And this is how "average" scientist looks like :-) Image credit: NOAA
The next step is to convert hypothesis to theory. We do it by predicting something. That’s the real key to how science works, so pay attention if you did not fall asleep yet. If you have a bunch of already known observations and just tie them together with some fancy story it is not proving, it is creating hypothesis. To prove hypothesis one should predict something unknown by now. In our simple “apple falls from the tree” example we could do this:
- Find another apple tree and wait till next August to see if apple will fall. In this case we are predicting apple fall for the next year. It didn’t happen yet, so it is a true prediction.
- Think “apple” real hard near another apple tree and see if it makes apple fall down. Here we predict apple fall by will. You can say: apple will fall down tomorrow at 3 p.m. because I will think really hard about it, it didn’t happen yet, so it is a true prediction.
- Take two bodies with mass and check out if they attract to each other. Let’s assume that we don’t know gravitational law here, so there’s no way we can know that there is a force between a chair and a hm… table ;-) So it is a real prediction, we predict something to happen while we don’t know if it will really happen.
After first two predictions fail and the third one works, the third hypothesis is promoted to theory. While hypothesis are not so important (you can create thousands of them easily) theory is something really valuable (remember it allows us to make predictions!). So, it’s the theories we fight for and it’s them who allows us to launch spacecrafts, because we know that any two bodies with mass attract to each other and how they attract. Now let’s give a credit to those who can figure out gravity laws from observing falling apples :-)
They say this guy discovered gravitational law when apple hit him in a head. Image from: csmh.pbworks.com
While scientific method I described works fairly well, no one can say that it is the best way to explore the world around us, we just did not come up with a better one yet (or maybe somebody did came up, but forgot to tell the others ;-).
