Science is knowledge gained from reproducible observations or experiments. Yet in a commentary in Nature in May last year, researchers from biotechnology company Amgen reported that the findings in 90…
Articles on Scientific method
Displaying 81 - 93 of 93 articles
Scientific fraud has raised its ugly head once more. In a note to chemists in the journal Organic Letters, Amos Smith, the editor-in-chief, has announced that an analysis of data submitted to the journal…
The debate over the impact of playing violent videogames on aggressive attitudes and behaviour is a long and heated one. Based on my research, I would argue the link is not as straightforward as A + B…
What roles do unconscious influences play on your behaviour and decision-making? The answer might not be as simple as you think. Imagine I showed you a list of words one by one on a computer screen and…
Fraud. It’s an ugly word, an arresting word. As with “cheating” it comes loaded with negative connotations, but can potentially lead to far greater penalties and consequences. And yet fraud in science…
In a sense, there is no such thing as climate change denial. No one denies that climate changes (in fact, the most common climate myth is the argument that past climate change is evidence that current…
Striving for agreement between theory and experiment and pushing the boundaries of precision are important parts of the scientific process. With each step in this process we move closer to enlightenment…
Empirical science needs data. But all data are subject to random variation, and random variation obscures patterns in data. So statistical methods are used to make inferences about the true patterns or…
At the heart of the scientific method is the process of hypothesis testing. Given an observable phenomenon in the world, a scientist will construct a hypothesis which seeks to explain that phenomenon…
The Book of the Dead describes the ancient Egyptian “weighing of the heart” ceremony as the placing of a heart on one side of a set of scales and a feather on the other. Goddess Ma'at’s feather represents…
Last week’s Health of Australian Science report, by the Chief Scientist of Australia Ian Chubb, has again highlighted the issue of declining student engagement in science in primary and secondary schools…
Calling something a “scientific truth” is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it carries a kind of epistemic (how we know) credibility, a quality assurance that a truth has been arrived at in an understandable…
THE STATE OF SCIENCE: How does science work? And how can we experiment on things that don’t fit in a lab? Dr Will Howard examines the many faces of the scientific method. As adults, our understanding of…
Top contributors
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Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Education; Curriculum Director, UQ Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland
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ARC DECRA Fellow, UNSW
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Associate Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Weather of the 21st Century, Monash University
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Professor in Philosophy, Director of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland
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Professor, School of Biosciences & School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne
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Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
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Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, Ross School of Business, School for Environment & Sustainability, University of Michigan
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University Distinguished Professor and Department Head of Statistics, Texas A&M University
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Professor, School of Psychology, University of Sydney
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Chair, The Conversation Media Group
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Associate Professor of Physics, Union College
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Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University
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Laureate Professor of Mathematics, University of Newcastle
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Laureate Professor Emeritus, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity
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Lecturer in Mathematics, Flinders University