Jimmy Steinmetz, age 14, of Denton, Texas, for his question:
WHAT IS THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD?
"Scientific method" is a term denoting the principles that guide scientific research and experimentation and also the philosophic bases of these principles. Whereas philosophy in general is concerned with the "why" as well as the "how" of things, science occupies itself with the "why" question only, but in a scrupulously rigorous manner.
The era of modern science is generally considered to have started with the Renaissance, but the rudiments of the scientific approach to knowledge can be observed throughout human history.
Definitions of scientific method use such concepts as objectivity of approach to and acceptability of the results of scientific study. Objectivity indicates the attempt to observe things as they are, without falsifying observations to accord with some preconceived world view.
Acceptability is judged in terms of the degree to which observations and experimentations can be reproduced. Scientific method also involves the interplay of inductive reasoning (reasoning from specific observations and experiments to more general hypotheses and theories) and deductive reasoning (reasoning from theories to account for specific experimental results).
By such reasoning processes, science attempts to develop broad laws such as Isaac Newton's law of gravitation that become part of our understanding of the natural world.
Science has tremendous scope. No single path to discovery exists in science and no one clear cut description can be given that accounts for all the ways in which scientific truth is pursued.
An approach to the method commonly used by physical scientists today was that followed by Galileo in his study of falling bodies. He was able to verify experimentally his study of falling bodies by rolling balls down an inclined plane.
Agreement of a conclusion with an actual observation does not itself prove the correctness of the hypothesis from which the conclusion is derived. It simply renders the premise that much more plausible.
The ultimate test of the validity of a scientific hypothesis is its consistency with the totality of other aspects of the scientific framework. This inner consistency constitutes the basis for the concept of causality in science, according to which every effect is assumed to be linked with a cause.
Scientists, like other human beings, may individually be swayed by some prevailing world view to look for certain experimental results rather than others, or to "intuit" some broad theory that they then seek to prove.
The scientific community as a whole, however, judges the work of its members by the objectivity and rigor with which that work as been conducted. In this way, the scientific method prevails.