Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
The scientific method sucks.
(Laughter)
Now, by that I don't mean that science sucks.
As a physicist, I believe that science has had countless benefits for humanity.
But when I was in eigth grade,
I learned about this thing called the scientific method.
And since then, I have done science, I have worked with other scientists
and I've taught science
to college students,
to K-12 teachers,
and to seventh and eighth graders - middle schoolers.
And from these experiences, I've come to the conclusion
that the scientific method ... sucks.
If it's been a while for you,
as it has been for me, since middle school,
let me run through it real quick for you.
First of all, Step 1: Identify a problem.
Step 2: Do some research.
Step 3: Form a hypothesis.
Step 4: Do an experiment with some independent and dependent variables
to test your hypothesis.
Step 5: Analyze data.
Step 6: Draw a conclusion.
It sounds good, right?
It certainly matches what we see on TV and in movies,
and what we see on the news.
Unfortunately, it completely misrepresents
what scientists do and what science is all about.
And this manifests in four main ways:
First of all, it's incredibly linear.
We start with a problem statement, and we end with a conclusion.
This implies that science is something that's once and done,
fixed for all time.
Secondly, it's not very intuitive.
How do I choose a problem?
What do I do with my conclusion when I'm done?
If I have no idea what should or even could happen,
how do I come up with a hypothesis?
This makes the process intimidating
and dangerous.
Three, there's a focus on conclusion -
reaching the conclusion, on getting a fact.
Well, what happens when the information changes?
What happens when facts change?
How does this process capture that?
And finally, the focus on experimentation.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of teaching students
to control for whatever random variables they can,
but there's been a lot of really good science that's been done
without being able to control for, well, anything.
For a moment, I'd like for you to imagine
what budget it would take to create a laboratory here on Earth
to study the interior of Jupiter.
Or to form a star from scratch.
Or to study a galaxy's development.
Do you want your tax dollars to go towards that?
Now, you may be thinking, well, it's probably not that bad.
I mean, we've trained generations of scientists using the scientific method,
myself included,
surely, I'm exaggerating.
Well, let me walk through a few statistics with you.
65 percent of Americans have little to no idea
what scientists do on a day-to-day basis.
(Laughter)
50 percent of them, however, have considered it,
whatever it is, dangerous.
(Laughter)
32 percent of middle schoolers, of eighth graders,
score at or above proficiency in science, in 2011.
The good news is, that's up from 30 percent in 2009.
The bad new is, that implies 68 percent, two thirds, middle schoolers,
score below proficiency.
30 percent of elementary school teachers feel well prepared to teach science.
Now that's compared to 52 percent
who feel well prepared to teach social studies,
66 percent who feel well prepared to teach mathematics,
and 77 percent who feel well prepared to teach reading and language arts.
But here's my favorite statistic of all, the one I find most telling.
Of 2,000 parents surveyed in the UK,
50 percent said that they feared
answering their children's questions about science -
questions like, why is the sky blue?
And why is the moon out during the daytime?
20 percent, one in five, said that in response to such questions,
they said, "No one knows" or made somethig up.
(Laughter)
This concerns me.
As a culture, as a civilization, we fear science.
Why?
Well, I believe there are three main sources of that.
First of all, we're obsessed with right answers,
we're obsessed with conclusions.
And as we go further and further, we learn more and more stuff,
we can't keep track of it all.
In addition, the facts, those conclusions, change.
Let me give you an example.
If you're like me, when you were growing up,
there were nine planets in the solar system.
In 2006,
one of these things was eliminated.
Which brings me to my third point:
Why?!
(Laughter)
We don't understand how do these decisions get made.
We don't understand the thought process behind it.
Now, all of these problems possibly don't lie at the feet of the scientific method,
but it's not helping.
There is, however, a better way.
Let me introduce you to the cycle of scientific thinking.
This starts with interesting observations.
What counts as interesting?
Well, if you find yourself asking the question:
What happened there?
Why did that occur?
What's going on?
It's probably interesting.
In the face of such questions, the human brain does an amazing thing:
It tries to come up with an answer, a story, an explanation
of what's going on.
Now, a lot of people are perfectly happy to have an answer.
But scientists - and this is what makes scientists different from other people -
scientists want to know if their answer is right.
And the way they do that is by saying,
"Well, if my explanation is true, is correct,
then I should also see this ..." They make a prediction.
And once you have a prediction, the only thing left to do
is to go make an observation, is to see if you were right.
And if you are, yay!
But if you're not, if you're truly lucky, and you got it wrong,
then that's going to bring up more questions -
questions that require more explanation.
Which leads to new predictions.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Now, why is this better?
Well, first of all, it actually represents what scientists do.
In fact, post-graduate education in science
is all about teaching people how to take interesting observations,
ask pertinent questions,
and then develop explanations that lead to observable predictions.
This is science.
But secondly, and more importantly, it's much more intuitive
and much more engaging.
The power is in your hands.
Once you have an interesting question, do you want to go to the library
and read up on other people's answers?
Or do you want to skip all that and come up with an answer of your own,
and see if you can make a prediction and test it?
It's up to you.
That makes it much less intimidating.
From this, as well, it becomes much more obvious
how examples, how explanations, change over time.
In fact, there are only three possible things
that can happen to a scientific model:
It makes the right predictions,
in which case it becomes stronger over time;
it makes a few wrong predictions,
in which case it is modified over time;
or it makes completely wrong predictions,
in which case it will be abandoned over time.
The last great thing about this model
is that it also illuminates something that's very dear to my heart:
the idea that any explanation must be able to be proven false.
And to explain this, I want to start with:
What would it take for me to show
that my explanation of a phenomenon is True, with a capital 'T'?
Well if it's true, then every prediction it makes
should match the observations.
Well how do I check that?
I have to check "every" observation.
That's not "every observation that I can make with my current budget."
That's not "every observation that I can make here
in this amount of time that I have."
It's "every" observation.
Everywhere. Everywhen.
It's not possible.
In order to prove an explanation false, however,
all I have to do is find out that it makes the wrong predictions,
and then make sure that I didn't make a mistake.
The way I think of this is to say:
If you give me a model that consistently predicts the wrong thing,
I can say with certainty, your model is wrong.
If you give me a model that consistently predicts the right thing,
I can say with certainty that your model is not wrong ...
yet.
Let me give you an example.
In 1781, we found the planet Uranus.
But it did this really weird thing.
At certain points in its orbit, it was further along than we expected
based upon our models, our understanding of gravity.
And at other points in its orbits, it hadn't traveled far enough.
It was almost as if it was traveling too fast at some points
and not fast enough at other points.
Astronomers looked at this, and they said,
"You know, it looks a lot like something is pulling it -
pulling it a little bit faster or a little bit slower
depending on where it is in its orbit.
Maybe there's a planet out there.
Maybe there's something interacting with it gravitationally."
And so they did the calculations, they found out where the planet should be,
and they pointed their telescopes in the sky at that location.
The planet they found we call Neptune, today.
Now, this was awesome to be able to do this,
and there were still discrepancies in Uranus's orbit.
So they did calculations,
they said maybe there's another planet out there, planet X.
They did the calculations,
they figured out where that planet should be,
and they pointed their telescopes into the sky at that point,
and they looked and they found ...
nothing.
And this was a problem.
And they said, "Okay," but they continued to look.
And eventually they saw something.
And it wasn't where they expected,
and it wasn't really the size they expected,
but they said, "We found something, and it's a planet,
and we're going to call that thing Pluto."
Fast forward 60 years.
Astronomers continued looking, continued taking observations.
And another one popped up.
Same size, same composition, same location.
And then another one,
and another one,
and another one.
And astronomers said, "Uh oh.
This is not looking so much like the other planets,
this is looking like the asteroid belt -
a collection of objects that all share the same orbit
but aren't really planets, not what we think of as planets."
And as the evidence, as the observations continued to build,
astronomers ended up having to abandon
this explanation of Pluto as being a planet -
it didn't fit.
In the same way, we need to abandon the scientific model.
It doesn't fit.
Instead, embrace the cycle of scientific thinking.
You don't have to be an expert to do science.
You don't have to know everything
to answer your kid's questions about science.
Even if the answer is: I don't know.
What do you think?
Observe.
Explain.
Predict.
That's enough; it's good enough.
Together, as parents, as educators, and as scientists,
we can prepare our kids, our students, our schools, and our country
for the challenges of the 21st century and beyond,
if we can learn to think differently about science over time.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)