Rudiments of Scientific Thoughts
Science and technology develops and changes in time but the rudiments of scientific approaches stay the same.
Science and technology has developed in the last 150 years and still continues to develop. In 150 years, many things have changed. Approaches to scientific thought and it’s necessities, justification of the knowledge, consistency of gathered information over the years… All of them have changed but still there are some which have not been altered yet.
What are they? This is open to approaches, ideas and thoughts. I allege that, they are the methods that the scientists have used. To my opinion, the methods that scientists use have five basic characteristics.
- Behavior must be observable because only the observable behaviour can be measured. Observer must be able to clearly determine whether the behavior is occurring, count the occurrences of the behavior and time the duration of the behavior. Behaviors which have a discrete beginning and ending are the easiest to measure. Measurements and interpretations must be unambiguous.
- The methods and data must be objective. That is, the opinions of the experimenters must enter into the gathering and interpreting of data as little as possible. Besides objectiveness, data must be verifiable and clearly understandable. Data must be precisely defined.
- The procedures must be repeatable. Other individuals who wish to do the same experiment or expand upon the data must be able to do so. The level of repeatability changes by depending on the experiment.
- Scientists must be able to communicate the results to others. They often do this at scientific meetings or through articles in professional journals. In the advent of computer technology, all results spread over the world in just seconds.
- Experiments must use a systematic approach. This means that they must follow an orderly arrangement of procedures. They must stick to a fixed plan that they determine before starting the experiment. This rules out the likelihood of the fact that scientists approach the problem haphazardly. Thus, it enables and guarantees to find the correct results with an analytical approach.
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10 Responses to “Rudiments of Scientific Thoughts”
On May 20, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I like the analytical approach, I wish more people could just take the time to be as thoughtful.
On May 20, 2008 at 4:33 pm
nice article, I agree with what Eddie said.
On May 21, 2008 at 5:27 am
A good analytical piece..
On May 21, 2008 at 9:10 am
Nice article!!!
Keep it up bro!!!!
On May 24, 2008 at 1:06 am
Well penned article!
On June 25, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Hi Lonely,
enjoyed your article
On July 19, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Isn’t this called the Scientific Method?
On August 9, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Psychology 101. The testing of a hypothesis.
Inciteful for those not familiar with Psychological processes.
Nice article.
On February 18, 2009 at 7:48 am
I was having a basic idea of these thoughts about scientific experiments in mind. But never made the list to check before every experiment.
In fact I wanted to find this information which would have already been disclosed by the scientific community.
Thanks for sharing this information. I always felt that the first and third points (observability of the experiment and its repeatability) are the most important things in any scientific experiment. Without these two basic things, you can never qualify your experiments as scientific!
On March 12, 2009 at 4:29 pm
I wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid……so this read is very fascinating to me!….well done!
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