Scientific Method Matching: Fill & Download for Free

Sounds like your philosophy professor has physics envy.He's also wrong. You absolutely can use the scientific method to test the scientific method. I'll get to that in a second.First, though, it's important to understand what the scientific method is. A lot of folks, surprisingly, get this wrong.The scientific method is not a method of arriving at truth. A lot of philosophers get a bit bent because they wrongly perceive scientists as believing that science holds all the answers to all the questions. It doesn't. The scientific method is not a series of facts (those are the products of its application), nor a method to determine absolute truth in a philosophical sense. It applies to a narrow and extremely specific realm: observations of and predictions about measurable events in the natural world. It can not answer questions about morality, beauty, subjective experience (except insofar as that experience is the predictable result of factors in the natural world), ethics, or anything else outside its domain.You can indeed apply the scientific method to itself. The objective of such a test would be to determine whether it as a methodology is better than any other methodology at constructing models of the natural world that make predictions about the natural world. The null hypothesis would be that there exists at least one other methodology that enables making predictions about the natural world that are as consistent and reliable as those made by application of the scientific method. You could falsify the hypothesis that the scientific method is the best method for producing models that make accurate predictions about the natural world by finding at least one other methodology whose ability to make predictions about the natural world was as good or better.So far, to my knowledge, nobody has done this--particularly not philosophers, which is why they can be so testy about it.We have used the scientific method to send the Rosetta probe on a complex path that involved four planetary flybys and a journey of more than 6.4 billion kilometers, at the end of which it was able to match speed and direction with a tiny speck traveling in a highly elliptical orbit at high speed around the sun.This is an extraordinary thing to do. Imagine making a hole in one at a golf course by bouncing your golf ball off a rock, a tree, someone else's golf ball in midair, and a passing sparrow. It was made possible only by our knowledge of orbital dynamics, which in turn was made possible by making predictions, testing them, adjusting the models, making predictions, testing them, adjusting the models, and so on.By way of comparison, Aristotle taught that women have fewer teeth than men--but even though he was married, he didn't bother to count them. :)

In the 15th century there was an explosion of scientific inquiry. Although the S-word was not being used.The investigation into how the world worked was then termed Natural Philosophy. It was about studying nature.The people doing this investigation were not atheists. They considered nature as the product of the Creator, and as good Christians, they saw it as their duty to investigate and explain its workings. How better than to gain insight into the Creator that to explore creation?Isaac Newton was arguably the most important scientist in history. He was a pious Christian, and was motivated to discover the mechanisms of the world because the world was God’s actual handiwork.At that point in history, few would argue that scientific thinking was connected with atheism.There are still scientists today who derive their curiosity about the world from their faith.But a couple of things have changed.The first is that there emerged a clear distinction between biblical authority and the observations of natural philosophers. The world is not as scripture says it is. The Earth is not the centre of the cosmos. The origin-mythology in Genesis does not match the evidence. There was no great flood, but there were dinosaurs. Our DNA reveals beyond doubt that we are not just related to the great apes, we are great apes.So there’s a conflict and there are only so many ways to process it.a) The universe is clearly the authoritative text. Scripture must be wrong. We must adjust our beliefs to match observation.b) The Bible is clearly the authoritative text. These silly science fellows must be wrong / misguided / inspired by the devil.c) La la la. Not listening. Can we just carry on as normal please?Most religious institutions ended up picking b or c. At that point they gave up the rational ground, preferring scripture to reality.The second issue is that science converged as a set of tools which allow human beings to establish truth. Or more accurately, tools to pull apart false arguments. The scientific method has been a consistently reliable way of preventing the self-deception which dogs any sort of inquiry. Individual scientists might get stuff wrong, but the scientific method auto-corrects the error.And if we apply the tools of the scientific method to religious hypotheses, we get nothing. These ideas have no predictive power, no falsifiability. They emerge as just a set of claims, not substantiated by evidence or logic.So people familiar with the scientific method, if they apply it to matters of faith, will see the weakness in theistic claims.Because religion has decided to ignore observation. It has ceded the rational ground to science. Rational people end-up remaining on the science side, which by default, has become the atheist side.And because the scientific method gives us tools to establish truth, those who understand that method, are unable to validate religious claims. This too might result in someone rejecting supernaturalism.

Yes. The basic methodology is internalized from a young age. Professional scientists don't even think about it and certainly don't think "I'm at the Hypothesis Step".It's hard for outsiders to see the use of the scientific method for the larger arcs of a scientist's career -- my research on dark matter -- I'm constantly coming up with new hypotheses and figuring out what new predictions there are from it. I don't test it directly, because there are on going experiments looking for dark matter (a multi-decade long worldwide program).But you can clearly see the scientific method in use when something isn't making sense. Say you do a calculation two different ways and they don't agree. "Why don't they agree?" is the question. You come up with possible reasons for the discrepancy, which are the hypotheses. Based upon that hypothesis you can figure out how to isolate the potential source of the discrepancy and make a prediction. Then you implement the change and test the hypothesis. Finally you take a look at the outcome and see if it matched your prediction and perform cross-checks to make sure you understand (or don't understand) the result. As a professional, you don't even say this out loud, you just iterate on this again and again until you understand the problem.So yes, we use the scientific method and it is used similarly in academics and industry. It extends far beyond traditional science -- may be your word processor is acting up and you have to figure out how to work around the problem. It's just methodical thinking and experimentation to understand the situation at hand.