Research Links:

• Designing and Conducting Scientific Experiments - The Internet Science Room
• Mankato State University provides a more detailed explaination of The Scientific Method.
• Science For All Americans is a good online book to read.
• A detailed explaination of the Uncertainty in Measurement, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
• Science, Design, and Education - Students' Information Technology (SIT), University of Wisconsin - Madison
• Problem Based Learning is part of NASA's Classroom of the Future.
• The Center for Critical Thinking will help you understand how to evaluate your learning experience.
• Teaching Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method at the Society for Developmental Biology.
• The book On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research should be required reading for all Science Students!
• There IS such a thing as Bad Science.
• Richard Feynman on The Scientific Method and Teaching.
• The TWINKIES PROJECT isn't exactly the scientific method, but it's fun.
• Galileo and Einstein knew something of the scientific method.

THE MOST POWERFUL EXPLANATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

ON SCIENTIFIC METHOD
by Percy W. Bridgman (From: Reflections of a Physicist, 1955):

It seems to me that there is a good deal of ballyhoo about scientific method. I venture to think that the people who talk most about it are the people who do least about it. Scientific method is what working scientists do, not what other people or even they themselves may say about it. No working scientist, when he plans an experiment in the laboratory, asks himself whether he is being properly scientific, nor is he interested in whatever method he may be using as method. When the scientist ventures to criticize the work of his fellow scientist, as is not uncommon, he does not base his criticism on such glittering generalities as failure to follow the "scientific method," but his criticism is specific, based on some feature characteristic of the particular situation. The working scientist is always too much concerned with getting down to brass tacks to be willing to spend his time on generalities.

Scientific method is something talked about by people standing on the outside and wondering how the scientist manages to do it. These people have been able to uncover various generalities applicable to at least most of what the scientist does, but it seems to me that these generalities are not very profound, and could have been anticipated by anyone who know enough about scientists to know what is their primary objective. I think that the objectives of all scientists have this in common--that they are all trying to get the correct answer to the particular problem in hand. This may be expressed in more pretentious language as the pursuit of truth. Now if the answer to the problem is correct there must be some way of knowing and proving that it is correct--the very meaning of truth implies the possibility of checking or verification. Hence the necessity for checking his results always inheres in what the scientist does. Furthermore, this checking must be exhaustive, for the truth of a general proposition may be disproved by a single exceptional case. A long experience has shown the scientist that various things are inimical to getting the correct answer. He has found that it is not sufficient to trust the word of his neighbor, but that if he wants to be sure, he must be able to check a result for himself. Hence the scientist is the enemy of all authoritarianism. Furthermore, he finds that he often makes mistakes himself and he must learn how to guard against them. He cannot permit himself any preconception as to what sort of results he will get, nor must he allow himself to be influenced by wishful thinking or any personal bias. All these things together give that "objectivity" to science which is often thought to be the essence of the scientific method.

But to the working scientist himself all this appears obvious and trite. What appears to him as the essence of the situation is that he is not consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels complete freedom to utilize any method or device whatever which in the particular situation before him seems likely to yield the correct answer. In his attack on his specific problem he suffers no inhibitions of precedent or authority, but is completely free to adopt any course that his ingenuity is capable of suggesting to him. No one standing on the outside can predict what the individual scientist will do or what method he will follow. In short, science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.

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