The Scientific Process

Scientific Process According to a text book the scientific method is super simple and very vague when in reality it is a more complex or detailed process. According to this reading it is nothing to run screaming from because it’s not difficult it just goes deeper than a text book explains or allows you to believe. These are the steps according to a science text book: Scientific Method:
1. Ask a question
2. Formulate a hypothesis
3. Perform an experiment
4. Collect data
5. Draw conclusions
Which is what we all learned throughout grade school but there is so much more to how science really works. Science is not a cook book where you have to go along with exactly what is going on there is so much more to it than that. It was stated that
scientists usually start with one topic and do research. While they are doing said research something else pops up and they veer in the direction of the new topic until they are at a completely new topic of discussion.
Talk about getting way off track. This kind of goes along with asking a question “What is this and how does it work?” and while they are trying to figure that out another thing sneaks in so it’s back to square one. In the text book versions it sums up to a conclusion that science has no room for creativity which is untrue because science actually thrives off of creative minds. It also says that science is done by one individual person when in reality it’s like a hive of amazing minds just buzzing around and coming up with new ideas. The real process of science is nonlinear and looks more like a circled chart. The first step of this in depth process is usually just a bunch of scientists poking around making observations, asking questions, sharing data and ideas, finding inspiration, and exploring the literature. When it comes to observation though scientists are not limited to just what they see it is also made up of things unknown to the eyes like, smells or tastes for example. Of course these observations will turn to a hypothesis that needs to be tested and gone over. The next step happens to be scientific testing which also happens to be the heart of
this process. This is where the real fun begins, gathering data to do this we need a hypothesis to get our expect results and observations and then after some research we can get to the actual results and observations. After we have our data we will need to interpret it. Supportive, contradictory, surprising, or inconclusive data may support a hypothesis, oppose a hypothesis, inspire a revised or new hypothesis, or even inspire revised assumptions. Testing is probably the most important part of science because without it we cannot come to a solid conclusion which would leave our society in wonder about too many things. There is also an entire scientific community which consists of researchers, technicians, educators, and students just to throw out a few. This entire community helps to develop and decode certain scientific studies but they are especially important in generating ideas, scrutinizing ideas, and weighing the evidence for and against those ideas. This step of community analysis and feedback consists of feedback and peer review, replication, discussion with colleagues, and publication. After that there is the process of coming up with new questions and ideas and theory building. The process of science is also intertwined with the society that surrounds it. This is because science is studying things that could improve the society, like health (diseases), developing technology, addressing societal issues, building knowledge, satisfying curiosity, and even solving everyday problems. Science is a very repetitive system and is always allowing you to broaden your knowledge on different things. These steps are the more in depth scientific method that is usually written in a science text book. They are closely related but this way just tells you more about the process of being a scientist and gives more detail to the steps everyone usually has etched in their brain.