for this video we're going to be talking about the scientific method um and that's going to include what you would typically call like the traditional scientific method which is what you've probably learned before and kind of the new improved more realistic scientific method so the goals really are for you to understand the basic components of science um and primarily the hypo how hypotheses work in hypothesis testing so what is science science is kind of a noun and a verb so you think about like a textbook like the textbook used for this class it's a collection of data it's a collection of things that we have learned using the scientific method and that way science can be a collection of facts or of information but the way we typically use science is as a verb so it's a way of understanding the world around us using a way using a test using a methodology that's both test testing ideas and is falsifiable so falsifiable is going to mean if it's not correct we can illustrate that that is indeed incorrect so true or false scientists follow a step-by-step scientific method meaning we make an observation we come up with questions we form hypotheses we test those hypotheses and we analyze those results and we just keep continuing that pattern in that exact order yeah that idea is not true it can be true in certain circumstances and it can be you can kind of change the narrative to make it kind of true but generally we don't follow that exact pattern so what we call the traditional scientific method is what you've probably learned before you make an observation you ask a question you form hypotheses you then make predictions and run experiments analyze your results and then report those results and refer back now this is a great tool for understanding how we do science but it is very much oversimplified here is a more updated figure that kind of illustrates more what we call the scientific process of how we actually go about conducting science now what you can see here is the arrows all kind of go back on themselves you can move from pretty much any piece of this diagram to any other piece at any at any given time and that means science is dynamic and not predetermined you can move around the scientific process at in various stages and various stages simultaneously and it's more nuanced and we're going to kind of go through each piece of this here but it is important to also recognize that the traditional scientific method is also embedded within this you could find the traditional scientific method within this diagram if you wanted to look for it now it's also very important to realize that at the very heart of this diagram is what we call testing ideas regardless if it's a traditional scientific method or the new updated scientific process the idea of testing ideas is central we come up with hypotheses we make predictions and we test those for example if you were to say like does fertilizer a make make more vegetables in my garden does it give me a more bountiful harvest that's a testable idea we can give it fertilizer a fertilizer b fertilizer a and no fertilizer whatever combination we we thought would be effective there and we can then test that idea and determine whether or not the fertilizer was helpful and that idea is central to the scientific process so in the early stages of scientific process you're probably working in that what we call the exploration discovery stage that's this top portion here now this is where you're interfacing with the information that's out there you're making observations coming up with ideas and trying to figure out what you're wanting to study a good example of this is what happened last night i was working out in some dunes near yuma arizona working on a research project and we came across a snake in what's called a creosote bush this snake is what's called is a coach whip scientific name is mastocophus flagellum and it is a diurnal snake meaning it's awake during the daytime it's very active it's a very fat snake it likes to be really warm and you pretty much never see the snake at night and so it was very unusual we found it in the tree um at night this was found maybe at like 11 p.m or so and so this brought brought me to state of a question like what is the snake doing is the snake seeking a refuge nocturnal refuge in trees something that we we have not previously known and so we make an observation we come up with some questions um we can talk with our collaborators we can talk with uh other researchers that we know see if they've seen anything else um related to this then we go with an idea we can create some hypotheses and test some questions out so in the fertilizer example this would be fertilizer a increases the production of vegetables in on plants due to the increased nutrient nutrients that it gives them and we can then come up with an experiment and we can test that idea now this can either be your your hypotheses can be supported or they cannot be supported either way it's a valid experiment as long as the experiment's conducted correctly um it's okay in science to not support your hypothesis it's okay to be wrong that's kind of the the beauty of science is that it can be right or wrong depending on what regardless of what you actually want it to be and we can also revisit this idea so oftentimes you'll run an experiment test your hypothesis something curious will happen or something that you weren't you didn't think would happen would occur and you can go back revise the experiment and continue testing now what is the hypothesis so a hypothesis is a tentative explanation of some phenomenon that you've observed or you're trying to test now the hypothesis must be testable meaning we can we can carry out some sort of experiment that'll test it and it must be falsifiable meaning that if it is wrong we can prove that it is wrong or that we can prove that it's right meaning some questions out there are not falsifiable and this is often where science and religion end up kind of arguing so oftentimes religion addresses questions or or seeks answers to things that are not falsifiable well science looks at the falsifiable questions so oftentimes so science and religion are kind of separate ideas in that regard now hypotheses can be supported and the more evidence you have the more studies you have supporting hypothesis the stronger it becomes but at any given time a hypothesis can be overturned if more data is collected that then illustrates that it's probably not correct now hypothesis is not the same as a prediction and this is very easy to mix up the main difference here is that a hypothesis has to include an explanation for example if this does fertilizer a increase the amount of vegetables grown in in a garden the hypothesis would be for if fertilizer a is given to plants the plants will have more nutrients available to them which will increase their vegetable growth now that includes an explanation the explanation being that there's more nutrients available a prediction just simply says what's going to happen if i give fertilizer a to a plant more vegetables will grow it's like an if then statement now an experiment is just a often beautiful and simple way of testing your hypothesis so this is a way of creating a standardized structure where you can put two or more ideas together and see what see what the outcome will be for example if you wanted to test fertilizers you might have two gardens one with fertilizer one without fertilizer and see how the how many vegetables are grown on each side so which of the following is an example of a prediction a my grandma's cookies are the best in the world b plants rely require sunlight to grow c if you don't water your plants then they will die d lying is immoral so the prediction here would be c right if you don't water your plants then they will die it's an if-then statement that says what you expect to happen but it doesn't it doesn't give an explanation so it's not a hypothesis now not necessarily the next one but um one of the often next routes in the scientific process is the community analysis and feedback stage so often times you have an idea you've conducted experiments then you need to get feedback to this feedback to your ideas now where this often occurs is in sciences we publish paper to scientists these papers are distributed to the science of the community or the people that are interested in them and when you do an experiment you write out your paper you send it into a journal the journal will then send it out to for peer review to people in your field it's those jobs the job of those peer reviewers to say is this good science is this bad science how can you make the science better and so over here you can see feedback for peer review that's part of the community analysis the scientific community is going to give analyze your work and give feedback if you do publish your results somebody else might replicate see if they can get the same results oftentimes when there's science that is done um that is purposefully done incorrectly to get a desired result it is found out that they did that when other scientists try and replicate that study and they find that they cannot replicate it even using the exact same method as the original authors you'll also have discussion with kali so this is often occurs at conferences so scientists hold these big conferences for different fields you'll go there and you'll talk with a bunch of other scientists about your work and then you can publish it and publishing it is like the final step of a scientific experiment where it now gets disseminate disseminated the the kind of the globe and the people who are interested in it can read it this is often when you can find the scientific papers on google scholar or other other search engines like that there's also a separate one which is the benefits and outcomes to the scientific process so this is how does the scientific community and the global community benefit from the scientific process and how the science interact with that this is a big part of my research my research includes a lot of really cool high speed videos and that catches a lot of attention of the pub of the general public and so a lot of my research interacts very heavily with this benefits and outcomes stage and there's a variety of different benefits and outcomes that can be included within the scientific process for example you could develop a new technology this could be something like the new like the coveted vaccines you could simply be building on knowledge so just expanding our knowledge base what's available out there a lot of if you think about shark week right a lot of the researchers that are doing that that those studies on shark biology that that captures the audience's attention are simply building our knowledge base and that's kind of one in the same as satisfying your curiosity you could address a bunch of societal issues so perhaps you're a climate change researcher and you're trying to build some way of capturing carbon you could addre you could have a societal issue there address the societal issue you could inform policy so maybe you're studying how how legislation or environmental policies may impact an endangered species to prefer to be protected or just solve some everyday problem so there's a variety of benefits outcomes that are included in the scientific process so looking at the diagram again you should be able to say which part of the scientific process is the heart of the scientific process here which part is central to the idea of science itself and of course that's a testing idea that's why it's in the center here now you can also divide science up into two other categories that's applied versus basic so basic science is just simply trying to answer fundamental questions applied science is trying to use science to solve a real world problem for example i study rattlesnake and kangaroo right interactions or prey interactions and i am not solving any real world problems when i'm doing that i'm just simply trying to understand how these interactions proceed how does the kangaroo rat get away from the snake how does the snake capture the king of rural and what are the intricacies of that interaction now if you wanted to look at the applied science you could take somebody say for example so we did basic science where they're looking at venom chemistry of some vipers what is inside the venom of a viper that's a simple fundamental question of biology they're answering it that's basic science but generally what will happen is after somebody does that and if they find something interesting some male state might say hey we might be able to use those those traits of that venom to solve some medical problem which is what they did with the jar car viper which is where they took the venom of that viper to build to create a blood pressure medication because blood pressure viper venom often has similar effects to what blood pressure medications will do obviously for it to be a medication after a more controlled reaction so applied science is solving a real world problem and basic science is solving a fundamental issue in biology that's not necessarily going to have a direct outcome to the real world and there's several examples here that you can read over i'll just go over one of them here so for example scientists study their application of site replication cycle of retroviruses all they're doing there is studying the life cycle of these viruses no real water application just learning about them however you could say researchers develop drugs to block different stages of hiv replication cycle hiv is a retrovirus they're trying to cure hiv or at least assist people with hiv that's applied science now there's also some big ideas in science so we talk about the scientific process we talk about hypothesis testing and falsifiability and all of that but these kind of lead us to what like scientific theories and scientific laws so theories are big ideas these are essentially hypotheses that have been supported hundreds or thousands of times and appear to be pretty true statements they're not necessarily factual but they're they and they can be overturned but our best evidence pretty much all of our evidence suggests that these ideas are probably true so they're the best explanations at the time some good examples of these are cell theories so that circum life is composed of cells german theory is that germs and sickness or sicknesses are caused by germs theory of evolution so that life evolves and continues to evolve these are descriptions of natural phenomena that we have tested for long long periods of time and appear to be true but if we find evidence to capture that we can still overturn these ideas this is not the same as a law laws describe the natural world as it actually occurs it simply is saying this is what happens in the natural world theories explain the natural world theories say the why or the how it happened not necessarily the what happened while the laws state just what happened theories and laws never become never become one another they're always separate ideas