If you search around the internet for explanations of the scientific method, you’ll find that there isn’t an agreement on the steps. Here are a few examples:
So what’s really happening here? Most science textbooks start off by teaching students the scientific method, as if there is one precise way to do science. One of the main reasons for this is to try to establish the concept of scientific rigor. By trying to put everything into a simple box, it is possible to portray science as the ultimate way to pursue what is true. Unfortunately, this representation is wrong from both a historical perspective and from a practical perspective. It is probably most correct to say that there are many scientific methods, and that those methods vary from one field of study to the next. How you might try to study physics is different from how you might try to study biology.
That said, it’s not as if the ideas behind "the" scientific method are completely wrong. There is still value to having a general framework as a guidepost, even if it’s not completely general or completely accurate in every context.
In this book, we are interested in trying to make the study of physics both practical and conceptual, but without getting too bogged down in unnecessary details. And trying to provide a precise formulation of the scientific is one of those unnecessary details. Instead, we will opt for a much more informal presentation of what the scientific method is.
Definition 1.1.0.1. An Informal Scientific Method.
The scientific method is a two-step process of making observations and formulating ideas based on those observations. In many cases, the ideas that are formulated lead to the creation of experiments in order to generate additional observations that can be used to refine those ideas.
This two-step understanding of the scientific method is probably the simplest way to think about the process of doing science. If we go back to the examples of the scientific method found on the internet, we can see that the two steps of making observations and formulating ideas are well-represented. Throughout this book, we will be referring back to these two steps as part of how we try to advance our knowledge of physics.
More importantly, this framework helps to establish something that Thomas Huxley (the person quoted at the start of the section) was getting at with his ideas. Here’s a longer quote from his essay "On Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature":
The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and exact. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and methods of a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely-graduated weights. It is not that the action of the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.
You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some familiar example. You have all heard it repeated, I dare say, that men of science work by means of induction and deduction, and that by the help of these operations, they, in a sort of sense, wring from Nature certain other things, which are called natural laws, and causes, and that out of these, by some cunning skill of their own, they build up hypotheses and theories. And it is imagined by many, that the operations of the common mind can be by no means compared with these processes, and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship to the craft. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men; but if you will not be frightened by terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong, and that all these terrible apparatus are being used by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives.
In other words, the idea he’s putting forward is that scientific thinking is just regular thinking, but more refined. There is no "magic" in the scientific method that is reserved only for scientists doing real science. It’s just a way of learning that is very similar to how people all over the world learn things. We pay attention to what’s going on around us, we have ideas for what’s happening, and then we see how those ideas play out in reality, and we allow that reality to refine our thinking a little bit more.
