The Scientific Method

Sitting there in your chilly Earth Science class, little eighth grade you can’t help but wonder how your textbook came to be. And why it was sent here to torture you.

Nobody ever thinks that, right?

But, for the sake of this article, let’s say that you do.

Think of all of the hundreds of years that scientists had to study, think, and sweat to bring you that giant book of knowledge about our world, and ultimately, our universe. Especially the constant expressions, like the acceleration due to gravity. It took hundreds of years of experiments to get to the number of approximately 9.81 m/s².

In this entry, I will review the history of the scientific method and explain how this amazing process has changed the way we explore our universe today. I will now tell a bit about some key scientists, because there are many, who really made some influential discoveries by using the scientific method.

The process of humans understanding the world around them shifted just before Galileo entered the scientific scene. It shifted into being more about observations becoming hypotheses, and those hypotheses going into experiments and coming out with data from which a conclusion would be drawn. This is what we know today as the scientific method. After a conclusion had been found, it could be published after it was reviewed by a fellow scientist. Then the experiment would be done by other scientists to be tested further, and to see if the results could be counted on and fully supported.

Galileo Galilei was one of the key scientists in the shift to the scientific method. His study, and published work, named Sidereus Nencius, or The Sidereal Messenger, was an account of the astronomical discoveries he made with a telescope of his own invention. He was particularly interested in Jupiter’s moons, or The Cosmian Stars, as he named them. This account was read by his colleague, Johannes Kepler, and he agreed with most of what was stated. Upon review, Galileo’s work was published and widely viewed by the scientific public.

After Galileo, there was Sir Isaac Newton and his work, Principia, published in. In it, he wrote about the law of inertia, and how it is the property of matter that resists motion. He wrote about the proportionality of force to acceleration in the equation/law: F=ma. He also wrote about the equal and opposite law. Then he “invented” the imaginary unseen force that justifies his laws; gravity. He also came up with calculus.

Following Newton came Albert Einstein. He discovered and proved that the speed of light is constant, and established the rules of physics. And of course everyone can recall his expression E=mc².

More discoveries came after that, like the expansion of the universe being at an accelerated rate, written in Adam Reiss’ paper about supernovas in 1998. Discoveries made about the cosmic microwave background, and the origin of matter. In Caleb Scharf’s book The Copernicus Complex, he says some things that I find interesting. I will paraphrase; the earth isn’t made of anything different than everything in the universe is. We aren’t special, it’s just rare that we are static in the universe. We are a rare solar system, but all other solar systems are unique in their own way.

Each of the scientists and experiments I’ve mentioned in this article had to go through the scientific method. They all began with an observation that turned into an idea, which became a hypothesis, and started an experiment that gave data and had a conclusion. And, what’s more, before being published, all of them were peer reviewed by other scientists. If it weren’t for the transition into using the scientific method and peer review, we would not have the information mentioned in this paper. We would not have modern science and technology as we now know it. Your smart phone would not exist without these discoveries. *gasp* I know!

To answer the central question, the scientific method has changed everything about the way we observe our material world. I am grateful for each and every one of these scientists, their dedication, and their experiments. Without any one of them, the scientific world as we know it would not be the same.