The Nature Of Science Of Nature

I have judged many a science fair project in my day. It is a learning experience, so adherence to the steps of the scientific method taught in most classes is O.K. But the students should realize that there isn’t just one scientific method. This young lady’s strategy was to take all the available time and be the only project that got judged; therefore, she's the winner.

A summaryof the usual (but hopefully disappearing) lecture on the scientific method –

I am using this picture because I couldn’t find a way to work the quote into the post. But in truth, science is like life, better results often come from many trials. So... science is like life which is like  science.

The design of the experiment should minimize any confounding effects that would render the results less than explicit. But, as the old saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” The middle of an experiment is often a learning moment. It is when you get into a study that you find the things that are going to make the study useless. Then you go back and design a better experiment.

Negative results and refuted hypotheses are the basis of science;  too bad they get a bad rap.  Can you think of another profession  where being wrong is your goal?

This leadsto the next problem implied by the process outlined above. It is usually taught that negative data is a bad thing. Even people in the profession often downplay the importance of negative data; ie. data that does not give a result that is publishable.

Editors don't get excited over studies saying we tried this and it didn't work. But, an experiment that doesn’t work isn’t necessarily bad – you can learn a lot from it and so can other scientists. Unfortunately, journals don’t like to publish this data, so those who might learn from it don’t get to hear it.

This is one reason why it is important for scientists to have meetings and talk to one another personally, not to just write journal manuscripts and funding applications. Case in point, it turns out that studies that show new drugs aren't cure-alls, that they don't do what they say or don't do it as well as they say don't published. Ben Goldacre gave a recent TED talk on the subject, and has numbers to back up his assertions that negative data studies on drug efficacies hardly ever see the light of day.

This is the black walnut tree (Juglans nigrans). The one in our front yard is about 70 feet tall and produces over 200-300 kg (500-650 lb) of fruit.   Black walnut dye comes from the husk, not the  nut, and is yellow when immature and black  when mature.

Consider an experiment I have been conducting for the last 10 years. We have a black walnut tree in our front yard, and I have been counting the number of black walnuts it drops every year since we moved in. I had no mechanism I was trying to define, I just wanted to know how many walnuts the tree produced.

Black walnut meats are expensive because they are hard to get out of the shell. But the shell is also economically important, used in paints, oil wells, explosives, cosmetics, cleaning and polishing agents, and jet blasting of metallic and plastic surfaces.

Try thisexperiment at your school. Find a tree and start to count the nuts, or find a sapling and count the leaves each year. You can keep this experiment going over a number of years, with each class adding their data.

Squirrels are kind cute, if you forgive them for carrying rabies. Here, he represents one source of possible error in my black walnut counts. Can you assume that every year they steal about the same percentage of nuts before I can count them?

I have asked these questions and am observing multiple parameters to see if they account for the pattern in nut production. But there may also be a biologic reason, something to do with energy output versus opportunity to produce offspring. All these items can be investigated and used to better explain the observations.