Looking under the hood of the scientific process

TJ Radcliffe pops open the hood on the scientific process and lets you peer inside to see the inner workings in unusual detail.  He also has a pretty good description of what science actually is:

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference. As such, it is fundamentally about exploration. We have ideas, we test them, we let the results of those tests guide where we go next. In the end, we publish, because if not made public it is not science. People were investigating reality long before the Proceedings of the Royal Society saw the light of day, but they didn’t accumulate knowledge because they didn’t publish. Science is both intensely individualistic and profoundly communal.

(Compare and contrast the level of detail and self-criticism to, say, this.)

He also offers up this brilliant little gem:

When someone lectures you on the importance of being open minded, try responding with something along the lines of, “I’m open to any idea that we can figure out how to test, because if it can’t be tested it probably can’t explain anything. If it can explain a phenomenon, then it can act as a cause on other things, so it can be tested, because we can make predictions of other things that it is likely to cause. If it can’t cause anything other than what it’s being invoked to explain, then it really doesn’t have any meaning beyond ‘the thing that causes that’, and that’s pretty boring. So give me an idea–one idea, not ten–and let’s talk about how to test it, what other consequences it would have that we can look into. I’m totally open to any idea like that.” 

The practice of science is very much about learning where to look for plausible ideas, and focusing on looking rather than imagining as the first step on any search for a more plausible proposition. This is difficult because it requires us to accept that we don’t know what the problem is and we might not be able to find the actual source. Imagination is much more comforting than reality at times like this. But we should learn to trust ourselves, and look to the world to guide us. That’s the only way we’ll find more plausible propositions. People were imagining answers to hard questions for thousands of years before we learned the discipline of science, and we have precious little besides some decent poetry to show for it. We certainly never cured disease or ended hunger that way.