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Chapter 1: What is the historical context of beliefs before the scientific method?
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Chapter 2: How did early scientific thinkers challenge existing beliefs?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm a data datist. Yeah. So once you are observing this data, well, there are a couple of kinds. There's quantitative data, which are numbers, like your body temperature is 98.6, although I think that's changed slightly now, hasn't it? Yeah, it used to be like if you were a human being, your body temperature is 98.6, and then you realize, no, there's a little more variation than that.
Yeah, but any kind of just numerical representation is quantitative, whereas qualitative is behavioral, like I'm going to watch that bird eat and poop for the next week. Right, or what happens if I... What will the slug do if I put a bunch of salt on it? Don't do that. No, you really should not do that. No, that's awful. But the reaction of the slug is gathering qualitative data.
And depending on who you talk to, there isn't qualitative data in science, that it should all just be quantitative. What? Yeah, because... Quantitative data is reproducible. Qualitative data is not necessarily reproducible. You can observe the same phenomenon, but you're not necessarily controlling it. Okay. I guess I get that.
But I agree with Bill here in that they go hand in hand, and neither one is more important than the other. You need to have both. Well, a lot of people do, and we'll talk more about it later, because without the idea that qualitative data is acceptable and scientific, you don't have the social sciences. They don't exist. Yeah, that's a good point.
But yes, we have quantitative data and qualitative data. I agree with you. They're both useful. Okay. It is an intellectual pursuit, so you can make observations on data all day long, but until you bring reason, in this case inductive reasoning, which is deriving a generalization based on your observations, then it's just data sitting there on a piece of paper.
Like it's supposed to lead you somewhere. Right, exactly. And so we should talk about inductive and deductive reasoning. Depending, again, it's really weird. One of the things I came across is that there's not... a universal agreement on how science is carried out. I saw some places where it was like, there's no place for inductive reasoning in science.
Then other places are saying, well, you have to have science using inductive reasoning. Everybody seems to agree that deductive reasoning is the basis of science. Right. But that you also have to have inductive. So deductive is basically taking a big, broad generalization. Yeah. And saying that it applies to something specific, more specific. Yes.
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Chapter 3: What role did the Renaissance play in the development of science?
And there is one on scientific reasoning that is just amazing. It's like a huge rabbit hole. You go down and you start clicking on the embedded links and you end up like understanding all sorts of stuff. So go check that one out. if you like understanding stuff. So that's one of the things that bug me if someone says it's just a theory.
And this does a great job of kind of throwing that out the window. Because it's basically mixing up the two definitions of theory. Yeah, there's like a colloquial definition that people use every day that doesn't really have much to do with the scientific use of it. Yeah, like I got a theory that Jerry in her one hour bathroom breaks every day is really playing Words with Friends. In the lobby.
I think your theory is correct. So that's a theory in the colloquial meaning. Right. As far as science goes, a theory is not just something you postulate, say, this may or may not be true. A theory is beyond the hypothesis, and it's something that is strongly supported in many different ways. There's all kinds of evidence to support something that eventually becomes a theory. Right.
So what you, your theory about Jerry's bathroom breaks in the scientific world would be a hypothesis. What? Fact?
Yeah.
Well, it'd be a scientific law. Yeah. But it ultimately would begin as a hypothesis, a hunch based on intuition, based on data you've collected, observations, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Where like, you know, you've seen that Jerry goes to the bathroom for like an hour to stretch. Yeah. Frequently when she comes back, she's finishing up a game of words with friends. Sure.
You've heard that she's been spotted in the lobby during these times. Yeah. So your hypothesis is that while she is gone for these hour-long bathroom breaks, she's actually down in the lobby playing words with friends, right? Yeah, based on knowledge, observation, and logic.
Right, so let's say that you decided to set up an experiment and you experimented and you went and you found Jerry playing Words with Friends five different times. And you told me about it. And I was like, I'm gonna run that same experiment exactly the way you did. I would test that same hypothesis.
If I found the same results to be true, then what you would have come up with, your hypothesis, would move to basically a theory. That is this widely accepted thing, this explanation that Jerry is not actually in the bathroom. She's downstairs playing with friends. It'd be the Jerry bathroom break theory. That's right.
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Chapter 4: Who were the key figures in the establishment of the scientific method?
Hook said, there are indeed. I can see them with my microscope. That's right, and that inspired a German botanist named Matthias Schleiden to look at a lot of plants, and he was the first guy to say, you know what, plants are composed of cells, and he was having dinner one night with his zoologist buddy. Yeah, and this is about 100 years later. Yeah, Theodor Schwan. And said, you know what, dude?
Order the wine and order the steak. Trust me, because this place is fantastic. And also, plants are made of cells. Don't tell anyone. And he went, you know what, dude? I have been investigating animals with microscopes. and they're made of cells too. And so they figured out at this dinner that everything is made of cells. All living things are made of cells. Boom. Okay, so this is huge.
This is a big advancement, right, that we're hitting upon right now. Huge. But it laid the further foundation, right? So initial scientific inquiry led to further scientific inquiry and further scientific conclusions and generalizations. All living things are made of cells. And then it was extrapolated elsewhere, right?
Yeah, like 20 years later, Rudolf Virchow said, you know what, not only is everything made of living cells, but they all come from pre-existing cells, which was a huge deal at the time because people believed in spontaneous generation at the time. Like if you left some wheat seed in a sweaty shirt, it would spawn mice, I think, was one of them. Gross. There's a lot of weird ones.
Press basil between some bricks and you'll get a scorpion? was one. Like they were really out there. Yeah, well, the one that is, well, not true, but the one that you could actually see was rotten meat would eventually spawn maggots. Right. How did they possibly get there? Yeah, spontaneous generation. That's the obvious explanation. And if you think about it, they're working from Occam's Razor.
And Occam's Razor says the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Yeah. All other things given. Well, the thing is, is spontaneous generation has never been shown to be possible. Right. If we've got the cell thing over here, let's investigate that. Yeah. So this, what was the guy's name? Virchow? Virchow.
He's saying, okay, well wait a minute, I've got this cell theory I'm working on that's been around for a couple of decades. Cell hypothesis, probably. Cell hypothesis at the point, nice catch. Don't feel bad, though, because this article that you sent said that scientists today still confuse those terms.
Yeah.
Just colloquially. And the HowStuffWorks article makes a good point in saying that science and everything that has to do with it in the scientific method is very fluid and open to interpretation and experimentation, obviously. So he says, okay, this cell hypothesis, this is a pretty good explanation for what we now call spontaneous generation.
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Chapter 5: What are the main steps of the scientific method?
Yeah, if you're thinking, if you're the type of person who's sitting around asking questions about aerodynamics, you probably already have some sort of sense that a box is less aerodynamic than a bird. That's right. Boxes rarely fly unless they're carried by one of those delightful Amazon delivery drones. They don't have those yet, right? They're not gonna do that, are they?
There's like a pizza delivery drone service, I think, where you have pizza or grilled cheese in New York and you go stand on an X after you order and it comes and drops it. That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And I can't wait to do it. I'll bet they're making a lot of money. That's pretty funny. Yet we can't get food to the homeless somehow. Exactly.
We can drop a grilled cheese on someone's head. Right. They're like, you homeless guy, get off of that X. Yeah, exactly. All right, so your hypothesis, I don't think we ever mention, is typically represented as an if-then statement. Yeah, if you're doing good science, it is.
Yeah, like if the car's profile, well, the example he uses, if the body's profile related to the amount of air it produces, which is the more general statement. Yeah, that's like based on a theory. Yeah, and it's going to get more specific. Then the car designed like the body of a bird will be more aerodynamic than one like a box.
So that's inductive reasoning, starting with a broad statement and going to something narrow. And it's if-then at the same time. And now you have a test. You have a question that can be answered. You can figure out a way to answer it. Yeah, and he points out, too, this is pretty important that your hypothesis, if it's formulated correctly, means it is testable and it's falsifiable.
Which are often one and the same. True. You know? Yeah. And that's, again, we go to the people who say that their soft sciences aren't real science. They're pseudoscience because a lot of the data that they come up with, a lot of the hypotheses they come up with aren't falsifiable. They're not testable. Right. It's a thing. It's an issue. It's a thing.
So next up in the steps, you're going to experiment. And when you experiment, you can't just go in there willy-nilly and do whatever you want. You have to set up specific conditions, and they must be controlled. That's the key. Yeah. And you want to, everything that's supposed to be identical needs to be identical. So basically you have two variables at least. You have an independent variable.
Yes. And you have a dependent variable. And if you're talking about car shape, that is the independent variable in this study. Yeah, that's the one that's manipulated. Exactly. It's the one you're controlling. The independent variable is the one you, the researcher, is controlling. So in this case, you're controlling the shape of the car.
You have yourself a bird-shaped car, and you have yourself a box-shaped car. So the shape of the car changed because you made it change. Now, when you blast a bunch of air over it during your experiment, what you're measuring is the dependent variable. So you're measuring what happens based on the change that you made. That's right. And you want to study one single variable at a time, basically.
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Chapter 6: How does one formulate and test a hypothesis?
And that we cannot know scientifically. But that doesn't mean that it does exist or doesn't exist. And that saying that science shows that it does or doesn't exist is by definition the opposite of what science shows. Science shows neither. It's not capable of showing or showing that something doesn't exist. Yeah, that's a good point.
The other place where science can get corrupted is when it blurs the lines or when people blur the lines between moral judgments and science value judgments. You can study global warming, you can study cause and effect, you can report data, But when you make that, secondly, to say, and this is a scientist, I mean, someone can come along and say global warming is bad, shouldn't drive your SUV.
That's fine. But a scientist can't do a study and say that because that's a value judgment, and that's where science can get corrupted pretty much. Right. You can study global warming and results until the cows come home, but you can't assert that if you use this light bulb, you're a bad person. Right, or ocean acidification is bad.
It's not good for humans, but if you're a jellyfish, it's awesome. Right. So yes, again, you made a great point. It's not science, it's people using science to make value judgments. Yeah. So ultimately, the scientific method, although it does have its limitations in that it needs empirical data to prove or disprove something, it's not flawed. That's not a flaw, that's a limitation.
And it's when it's misused, then its results become flawed or skewed. And that's the people doing it, man, not science. It's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah, man, this is a good one. I thought so too, man. Way to start out with a bang. Boom! It's all downhill from here. If you want to know more about the scientific method, check out that article on The Economist. Check out Explorables.
And then, of course, check out the scientific method in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. That's right. But quickly, before listener mail, we get asked by listeners all the time, what can we do? Since you have a free podcast, we can't pay for it. What can we do to help you guys? Yeah. And one thing you can do that we would appreciate is...
Go to iTunes and leave a rating and a review for us. Yeah. That makes a big, big difference in keeping us up there in the rankings, which means more people find stuff you should know. After they listen to Serial, they'll just say, well, geez, there's other podcasts in the world? What is this podcast? So ratings and reviews really help us out, and it doesn't cost you anything but a few minutes.
Be honest. We're not saying go leave us some great review, but go leave us a great review. You said it. And tell one person about stuff you should know. We would appreciate that, too. Turn somebody on to the show, and that's it. That's our version of a pledge drive. Wow. We do that, what, once every three years now? Yeah, not very obnoxious. And it lasts 40 seconds.
All right, so on to listener mail. This is from my sister-in-law, actually. Oh, yeah? That's some nepotism. Yeah, Jenny Bryant. She mentioned in the homeschool episode, homeschooled her kids for a little while. And she sort of corrected me. Love the homeschooling episode, guys.
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