We are all scientists?

Are we all Scientists?

As far as I can tell, we go about our lives mostly without realising, that we make decisions based on our knowledge and experience. This is basically the same in science.

We see a problem, or something interesting, we make up our mind what it is causing it (the hypothesis), we may seek evidence or more info (testing the hypothesis), and if it is confirmed, then our belief becomes solid. If if the hypothesis is proved incorrect then we need to formulate a new idea, and so on, until the theory is so thoroughly tested that it becomes a fact (in our mind at least).

Most of this goes on on a subconcious level, is is just mundane daily stuff, not to interesting.

When an event that is way out of the ordinary happens, and the availability of evidence, is non existent, or the event happened so fast, that it was hard to pay close attention, to get more information, we tend to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, with what we already know, or have been told.

If you are not being critical in your thinking, and need an answer now, then the story you come up with may lack detail, may not be well considered, or a number of other things may happen. All leading to a result that may sound reasonable, but may not reflect the truth of the situation. Just ask a detective how many different accounts they get from a crowd of people all watching the exact same event.

So when someone exclaims something incredible. Then they must have incredible evidence to back it up. Something solid like, photo's, video, DNA, remains, documents that are related directly to the event, etc. Even then a single piece of evidence may not be enough to be conclusive.

As I mentioned earlier science is a process, not a bunch of facts.

Just ask a scientist how many times they have made a mistake. They will probably tell you outright that they have made many (it may be the mistakes that were the most interesting). The beauty in this is that you learn something from your mistakes (hopefully).

Don't trust anyone who never makes a mistake (politicians are never wrong), all it means is they don't recognise a mistake and so never correct it, or learn from it. If we don't learn from our mistakes we don't progress.

Be happy with change. Science is constantly changing. Some strong theories of the past have been overturned because of better evidence. Although for the majority of theories, new experiments and testing just refine the theory., with its broad "intent"still valid.  Better designed experiments can yield more reliable results.

Just look at Andrew Wakefield, he had a hypothesis, he tested it, and came up with an interesting result. Subsequent experiments on significantly larger populations, and tightly controlled experiments have since shown his results to be incorrect. (He can't bring himself to accept these results, so doesn't learn anything new).

Embrace your mistakes, they are things you can truly call your own, but more importantly, learn from them.