Hobbies And Interests
Formulating Testable Hypotheses
When confronted with an unexpected or interesting occurrence, humans naturally want to understand the cause. Asking and answering "Why?" questions are an essential motivation for scientific endeavors. A scientific hypothesis is a possible answer which can be tested for accuracy.
You create hypotheses all the time, whether you seek to explain a coworker's erratic behavior or a houseplant's dwindling health. Rather than appealing to fate, luck or ineffable forces, use a scientific outlook to formulate testable hypotheses. This way, although your first guess may be wrong, you will move closer to finding the true cause.
Documentation and Following Procedures
Scientists learn to document their actions exactly, so later researchers may closely follow the procedures and reproduce results. An inexact instruction or incorrect measurement could significantly alter the experiment, skewing the results and putting a scientist's conclusions in jeopardy.
Implement procedural exactness in normal life by utilizing careful record-keeping. When you give directions, write instructions or record a recipe, imagine your words from the reader's perspective. Make sure to explicitly state things that you may already know, such as standard quantities and definitions of technical terms.
Control Groups and Independent Variables
When a scientist has a specific, testable question he wants to answer, he will split his test subjects into groups. He then compares a control group, where conditions are unchanged or neutral, to experimental groups which each experience a change in one variable.
This approach will work in everyday life when you attempt to test your own hypotheses. For instance, you may wonder why your houseplants are dying. You could move one pot to a sunny windowsill and add more water, but if the plant recovers you won't know whether the light or the water did the trick. Instead, move one plant into the light, give another extra water and leave a third alone. By carefully isolating your variables, you can obtain more information about problems and their solutions.
Sample Size and Repeated Trials
When scientists perform an experiment, they use a large sample size or many trials to reduce experimental error. Fluke events can always happen, and if a scientist is relying on only one or two test subjects, these can radically skew the results.
Employ scientific thinking by collecting enough data to support your beliefs. Never make generalizations based on one or two isolated incidents, as these events could be remarkable outliers which are not representative of the overall trend.
The Impossibility of Verification
In science, theories are formed, tested, supported and falsified but never verified. No amount of experimentation can ever truly prove that a hypothesis is correct. You can still work under the assumptions of a good theory, but never ignore data that contradicts your beliefs.
Keeping an open mind is a useful skill in all walks of life. Always listen, observe and consider revising your positions, rather than clinging to your beliefs in the face of conflicting evidence.