
Lecture Archive
Scientific Method and Theory
Scientific Method and Theory
James Danoff-Burg
CERC
Columbia University
Goals of science
- Describe the patterns that are found in the natural world
- Explain patterns
- This is the major emphasis of your individual project
- Ditto for most of the activities that we are doing in the class
Methods of Explanation
- Include those of descriptive science
- Approximately 11 Steps
- Process is repeated many times
- Can NEVER prove a hypothesis
- Can only reject many, leaving one as best supported by the data
- Proof is a common fallacy
Hypotheses
- Null hypothesis
- The hypothesis of no change
- Often abbreviated as Ho
- Alternative hypotheses
- Often abbreviated as Ha, Hb, etc.
- All must be mutually exclusive
- We accept one if Ho is statistically rejected
- Which Ha to accept is determined by trends in data
Scientific Method Steps 1-5
- Observe or suspect pattern
- Posit cause or significance of observed difference
- Create answerable question to explain pattern
- Create testable hypotheses
- Design experiment
Scientific Method Steps 6-11
- Collect data (Descriptive stage)
- Analyze data, primarily using statistics
- Evaluate hypotheses, reject Ho?
- Make conclusions based on data
- Note problems in current work
- Predict future directions for research
Parts of a scientific report
- Title
- Abstract an overall summary
- Introduction background, question, Has
- Methods what we did
- Results what we found, analyses results
- Discussion interpretations, predictions
- Acknowledgements who helped us
- References who we cited
Transmission Methods in Science
- Written report
- Oral presentation
- Commonly used for preliminary presentation of work to get feedback before writing it up
- Poster
- Visual summary of work used at conferences
- Web page
- Can use a written report & make it interactive