Science at work

Jesse Morgan

So I read this awesome article about faster than light information transfer between two photons and thought it was an excellent example of scientific method at work. Here’s the short version of what I mean.

Scientists did something and something SPOOKY happened.

  1. They observed something spooky and say “How the hell did that happen?” and take notes.
  2. They review their notes and say “This makes no damn sense, unless…” and come up with an idea of how it happened. (Note that this is a hypothesis, not really a theory since there’s no supporting evidence, yet.)
  3. They write down their good idea and say “If I’m right, then X should happen when I do *THIS*”
  4. They do *THIS*
  5. Once the smoke clears, they take pictures of the resulting carnage.
  6. They try to piece together exactly what happened (THIS is a theory as long as it allows you to perform more tests to strengthen or refactor your idea).
  7. Then say “hey guys, check this out…”
  8. Others check it out and say “Cool, I wanna try!”

and the process repeats. Depending on how you look at it, they are either on step 1 or step 7. That’s the beauty of the scientific method- it’s recursive.