How Do Scientists Make Discoveries?
The Scientific Method
The scientific method was developed over many centuries, and today it is a logical and well-defined system. You can think of the method as having five steps:
- Ask a question.
- Gather information through observation.
- Based on that information, make an educated guess--or hypothesis--about the answer to your question.
- Design an experiment to test that hypothesis.
- Evaluate the results.
If the experiment shows that your hypothesis is wrong, make up a new hypothesis. If the experiment supports your hypothesis, then your hypothesis may be correct! However, it is usually necessary to test a hypothesis with many different experiments before it can be accepted as a scientific law--something that is universally accepted as true.
You can apply the scientific method to problems in everyday life. For example, suppose you plant some seeds and they fail to sprout. You would probably ask yourself, "Why didn't they sprout?"--and that would be step one of the scientific method. The next step would be to make observations; for example, you might take note of how deep the seeds were planted, how often they were watered, and what kind of soil was used. Then, you would make an educated guess about what went wrong--for example, you might hypothesize that the seeds didn't sprout because you didn't water them enough. After that, you would test your hypothesis--perhaps by trying to grow the seeds again, under the exact same conditions as before, except that this time you would water them more frequently.
Finally, you would wait and evaluate the results of your experiment. If the seeds sprouted, then you could conclude that your hypothesis may be correct. If they don't sprout, you'd continue to use the method to find a scientific answer to your original question.
¿Cómo hacen los científicos para realizar descubrimientos? El método científico (Spanish Version)