The Scientific Method

Huston Smith, a professor of religious studies, once said, “When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.” Now that people realise that the Scientific Method plays such an important role in modern science, the Scientific Method really needs to be explored and understood better. Most students are taught that the Scientific Method has one direct order, but in reality it embodies more of a cycle. The Scientific Method is more like a cycle instead of a linear process because, the experimenter can jump around with the steps and they can restart from the beginning whenever they have to.
The first, and most apparent,
There is no particular order that a scientist is forced to follow. Dr. Judah Folkman, a famous American medical scientist, conducted an experiment to test whether reconstructed blood could allow the growth of a tumor cell in a thyroid gland. He realized that the tumor needed angiogenesis in order to grow. This is where his Scientific Method came into play. In most Scientific Method descriptions, the scientist needs to ask a research question in order to drive his experiment. On the contrary, Dr. Folkman constructed a hypothesis as his first step. He thought there must be a certain chemical in the tumor that caused new blood vessels to grow. Subsequently, he skipped ahead a couple steps and contacted his fellow researchers to see if they had any ideas to contribute to
Walter Alvarez, a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department at the University of California, studied plate tectonics in the 1970s. An interesting observation would ultimately lead him to try and answer one of the biggest questions in the science world: why did the dinosaurs go extinct? His use of the Scientific Method started there. After some research about the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field, Alvarez reached out to a few of his partners to dive further into the topic. To do some more background research about the case, Alvarez hiked up and down the Apennine Mountains gathering samples of various rocks that would show the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. He found that on one side of the boundary there was a great number of diverse species of marine fossils, and the other side did not contain very many marine fossils at all. This would bring him back to the beginning by asking another question: why was there such a decline in marine life ("Asteroids and dinosaurs” n.d.)? This example shows that when a scientist is undergoing an investigation, they can start at the beginning multiple