Doing Science is All About Not Fooling Yourself

After you've found a great science project idea that really interests you, you need to figure out exactly what steps you will take to conduct your science experiment. Here's a really important tip: the goal of any science experiment is to answer a question while taking every reasonable precaution not to fool yourself.

Try this science experiment: Dip one hand in hot water and the other in ice water for as long as you can stand to. Then immediately put both hands in the same tub of luke-warm water. One hand will feel the water to be nearly scalding hot, and other other will feel it to be quite cold (which feels what?). Clearly, your sense of touch isn't a very good judge of something's temperature. So if you want to know how hot or cold something is, you have to measure the temperature with a thermometer.

In fact, all of our senses are pretty easy to fool. That's why scientists know that they must use rulers, thermometers, light meters, and so on when they need to get accurate and reliable information about something they want to study. That is, scientists "quantify" their observations, and so should you!

Why do scientists keep log books? So their memories won't fail them when it's time to understand what their science experiment means. Why do they graph their results? So the meaning of the data can be made crystal clear to them and to anyone else who studies their log book. Why do they use mathematics? Because averages, and standard deviations and all that gives an experiment a clear result that is not open to guess work.

Try to think of other things that scientists do and ask yourself how that practice could help a researcher from fooling him or herself. If you think about it, I think you'll agree. Every single thing that a scientist does in a science experiment is aimed at making sure the scientists aren't fooling themselves.

So, when you are designing your science fair project, keep asking yourself "how can I be sure, how can I be sure, how can I be sure..." and you will do alright.

Dr. Shawn

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Comments

[Science Project]

Thanks for sharing the thoughts and tip. Every scientific approach has a certain procedure in order to get the most accurate or reliable result. Thanks to science and its methods in solving scientific problems.

Kris