FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
General Questions
1. WHAT IS SCIENCE?
(Taken from Unit I, Chapter 1, of the
Rx for Science Literacy teacher manual.)
Introduction
Maybe it's easier to begin by telling you what science is NOT.
Science is not a massive jigsaw puzzle that is slowly being pieced together one piece at a time. In a jigsaw puzzle, once you get a piece to fit, it stays there forever.
Science is always evolving! Things people were sure about 500 years ago are things we laugh at today! Science is a continuous stream of ideas that are constantly being reshaped, added to, subtracted from, and built upon...more like a lump of silly putty than a puzzle.
Science is, and always has been, about PREDICTABILITY. The science that we "know" today gives us the ability to predict certain things about the world around us. What time will it get dark tonight? What will happen if I stick my tongue to a flagpole when the outside temperature is below freezing? What will happen if I mix flour, sugar, eggs and milk in specific combinations and bake the mixture in an oven? In each case, science allows us to PREDICT what will happen.
How to Think Like a Scientist
Anyone can think like a scientist! You just need to exercise your brain in a few simple ways. Some things give you more clues than others, and the more clues you have, the better predictions you can make. To find the best predictors, you need to:
- BE CURIOUS — look around and ask questions about things! Why is the sky blue? How do amoebas eat? How can I get energy from the sun?
- BE SKEPTICAL — don't always believe the first thing you hear. Look for MANY possible explanations, see which facts support which explanations, and then pick the best one. Do you believe in UFOs? Bigfoot? Is Elvis alive? WHY? (These may all be true...but is there really any evidence to support them NOW?)
- BE FLEXIBLE — even after you've found one explanation, keep looking! Sometimes you can find an even better one later. Don't be afraid to give up old ideas for new ones, as long as they've passed the skepticism test!
These three brain exercises add up to what is called CRITICAL THINKING...what scientists do all the time!
Critical thinking is not a guarantee of truth. Even scientists can be fooled by clever hoaxes, or spend years believing erroneous things until new information becomes available.
How to Act Like a Scientist
Once you're in the habit of thinking like a scientist, it's a simple matter to APPLY it to real life. You can use the same logical four-step approach that they do; it's called the scientific method.
The scientific method is built on four ideas:
- OBSERVATION — carefully watching something around us — in the environment, in animals, or in ourselves — in an objective way. Objective means that we use standard units and equipment, so that someone else using the same units or equipment could measure the same things and get the same results.
As a general rule, the more quantifiable (measurable in objective units), the more valuable a predictor is. For example, "It sometimes rains when the barometer reads 29.3 mm of mercury" is a better predictor than, "It sometimes rains when my knee hurts."
- HYPOTHESIS — an educated guess explaining what you are observing, or how to change what you are observing. For instance, if you observed that a certain houseplant grew faster after you gave it some plant food, your hypothesis could be, "Plant food stimulates house plants to grow."
- EXPERIMENT — testing your hypothesis by designing and carrying out an experiment. To test your hypothesis about plant food, you would gather a group of plants that were the same species and size as well as growing in identical pots and soil. The plants would be divided into two groups: experimental and control. The experimental group receives plant food, and the control group does not. All other variables — such as amount of sunlight and water each plant receives, and the temperature of the room — must be kept the same for both groups. If you change more than one variable (for example, if one group receives more sunlight), you cannot make any conclusions about whether plant food has any effect.
Part of designing an experiment is determining what measurements, or data, you will take to compare the experimental and control groups. In the above experiment, you might decide to measure plant height, number of leaves, size of the leaves, color of the leaves, or whether the plant flowers.
The measurements you choose should be repeatable by someone else as well as relevant as a predictor. For instance, two individuals could count the number of leaves on a plant and arrive at the same number, but could they both objectively measure leaf color? And is leaf size a relevant predictor if the plants you are using normally have a wide variety of leaf sizes?
It's important to gather enough data and have a sufficient number of subjects in each group. If you gave the experimental group plant food and made your measurements the next day, you probably would not see any difference. A scientist would take measurements before he or she fed the plants (baseline data); collect data at regular intervals over a period of time; average the measurements taken on a given day together; and examine those averages to look for a trend. The scientist often uses a branch of mathematics called statistics to calculate whether the difference between the groups was significant.
- CONCLUSION — judging on the basis of your experiment if your hypothesis is right or wrong. Your conclusion usually falls into one of two categories:
a) CORRELATION — two things that tend to happen together.
b) CAUSE-EFFECT — one thing or event actually causes the other to happen.
For example:
Correlation: Every time I go ice skating;
a) I get cold
b) I bruise my bottom.
I know that both of these things happen when I go ice skating, but I don't know if one causes the other.
Cause-Effect: Every time I go ice skating;
a) I fall down and
b) I bruise my bottom.
In this case, I notice that if I can prevent the first one from happening, I can prevent the second...therefore, A causes B!
Correlation can be established through observation. You just need to notice two things always seem to occur together.
Cause-effect is tougher to establish. Once you've noticed two things occurring, you need to TEST to see if they are actually linked to each other. Cause-effect is a better predictor than correlation.
Why Bother?
Throughout evolution, it has always been to an animal's advantage to be able to predict things around it.
- If a deer smells a wolf, it can predict danger and run the other way.
- If a ground squirrel feels the temperature drop, it can predict winter is coming and prepare to hibernate.
- Humans predict too. There are warning signs in our lives that predict tax raises, spoiled food, etc., and we alter our behaviors based on the predictions we make.
Science is Just a Way of Making Predictions
Predictions are things like:
- Using medicine X will clear up symptom Z.
- Using a seat belt will keep you from flying through the window if you are in a wreck.
- Losing the ozone layer may increase the risk of skin cancer.
- Predicting these things allows us to make decisions about our future.
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