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Working like a scientist
Suppose your pen stops writing in the middle of a sentence. You do not need a laboratory to find out why. You look closely at the pen first — that is observing. Then you ask yourself why it has stopped — that turns the puzzle into a question. Next you guess an answer, perhaps that the refill has run dry. You test that guess by opening the pen and looking inside. Last, you decide what the test showed — perhaps the refill really is empty, so a fresh one is needed.
Those five steps make up the whole method. This book calls it working like a scientist. The steps are: observe, question, guess, test, and work out what the test showed. A bicycle tyre that keeps losing air can be chased down the very same way. Look at the tyre and ask why it keeps going flat. Guess where the air escapes, test the guess, then decide what you found.
Anyone who runs these five steps is working like a scientist. It does not matter whether ‘scientist’ is their job title. Most scientists do not even work alone. They work in teams — the same way you might ask someone at home for a second opinion.
Run all five steps, in order. You are working like a scientist, whatever your own job title happens to be.
None of the three people in this example ever enters a laboratory, and all three are working like scientists.
A person cooking food notices that the dal has boiled over onto the stove. She observes the mess, asks why it happened, and guesses that too much water went into the pot. To test the guess, she checks how full the pot was against how much dal was in it.
A bicycle repair worker finds a tyre that will not hold air. He observes the flat tyre, asks where the air is escaping, and guesses at a puncture near the valve. He tests the guess by dipping the tube in water and watching for bubbles.
An electrician finds a lamp that will not light. She observes the dead bulb. She asks whether the fault lies in the bulb or in the switch, and guesses it is the bulb. She tests the guess by trying a bulb she already knows works.
Each of the three people observed a problem, turned it into a question, made a guess, and checked that guess. That is the same method the last page called working like a scientist — and none of it needed a laboratory.
A laboratory is never required to run these five steps — a kitchen, a bicycle, and a lamp are proof enough.
A guess worth testing
Not every guess is equally useful in this method. A guess earns its place only if it names something you could actually go and check.
Take the stopped pen from before. Guessing that the refill has run dry is a testable guess — you can open the pen and look. Guessing that the ink has dried inside the nib is testable too — you can look for dried ink there instead.
Now compare that with guessing that the pen stopped ‘because of bad luck’. There is nothing to open, nothing to look at, and nothing that would show the guess to be right or wrong. A guess like that leaves nothing to test, so the method cannot go any further with it.
A useful guess names something checkable. An unhelpful one, however confident it sounds, does not.
It is tempting to feel that a wrong guess means you have done something wrong, or that the whole method has failed. It has not.
Go back to the stopped pen. Suppose the first guess — that the refill has run dry — turns out to be wrong. The refill is still full. That wrong guess is not wasted. It rules out one explanation and points you toward the next one: perhaps the ink has dried inside the nib instead.
A guess ruled out by a test is the method working correctly. It is not the method failing, and it is not you failing either.
Testing with what is already at hand
Testing a guess simply means finding evidence that would look different depending on whether the guess is true or false. Most of the time, that evidence is close at hand.
Opening a pen and looking at the refill is a test. Running a hand along a bicycle tyre to feel for escaping air is a test. Checking whether a bulb or a switch is the broken part, by swapping one at a time, is a test. All three use only plain looking, listening, touching and comparing. Nothing is bought and nothing is borrowed from a laboratory.
A laboratory or special equipment becomes necessary only for a few kinds of question. The thing being studied may be too small to see, too far away to reach, or too dangerous to check directly. Most everyday questions are none of these three, which is why most everyday testing needs no laboratory at all.
Most tests need only looking, listening, touching and comparing. Save the laboratory for what is too small, too far, or too dangerous to check directly.
It is easy to think real science only happens inside a laboratory. Nothing in this chapter supports that idea.
Checking a pen’s refill is one ordinary, equipment-free test. Feeling a tyre for escaping air is another. So is testing whether a bulb or a switch has failed. Every one of them counts as a genuine example of working like a scientist.
A laboratory is one place where science happens. It is not the only one.
What you saw, and what it means
A test always produces two different things, and it helps to keep them apart.
Opening the pen and finding the refill still full is an observation — a plain record of what you actually saw. Deciding that the ink must have dried inside the nib is a conclusion — what you take that observation to mean.
Working alone, with nobody nearby to check your reasoning, makes this even more important. Write down what you actually saw first. Decide what it means only afterward. If your conclusion later turns out shaky, you can question it and try again. You will not need to repeat the whole test to remember what you first found.
An observation is what you saw. A conclusion is what you decide it means. Only the observation can be checked directly.
Asking others, and going on alone
Science is usually a team activity. Asking someone else for help is a normal part of the method — most scientists work in teams rather than alone.
But there will be times when nobody is around to ask, and the method still has to run. When that happens, write the question and the guess down, so neither gets lost. If the first test does not settle the matter, test the guess a second way, using whatever else is at hand. And if a question still has no answer, keep it rather than drop it. You do not have to answer every question in the same year you ask it.
A question kept for later is not a question given up on.
Scientific knowledge is not handed down complete. It is built up piece by piece, over years, and some pieces already put in place are later moved.
Every new finding adds to what is known. It usually opens more questions than it closes, which is one reason the work never really finishes. Sometimes a new finding shows that something people were confident about had been placed in the wrong spot. When that happens, the earlier idea is corrected, not defended out of stubbornness.
This is the same lesson as the wrong guess on the last page, only at the scale of an entire subject. A subject that keeps correcting itself this way is working properly — it is not a subject that keeps failing.
A textbook sentence corrected later is not proof the book was wrong all along — it is proof the method is still running.
One method, five steps, no laboratory
This whole chapter is one method, run on any question you like. The steps are: observe, question, guess, test, and work out what the test showed.
None of it needs a laboratory. A wrong guess is progress, not failure. And a question nobody nearby can answer is one to keep for later, not one to drop.
Every later chapter in this book runs the very same method on a new question. Only the subject changes — the same five steps stay underneath.
No laboratory is needed. A wrong guess still points somewhere. A question kept for later stays part of the same five-step method.
Practice
This exercise practises naming the five steps of the method, in the order they run. Use the chapter’s own pen example to check each answer.
Check yourself against the chapter’s own pen example — the five steps run there in exactly the order this exercise asks for.
- practice Write the five steps of the method, in order, without looking back at the chapter.
- practice In the pen example, looking closely at the pen to see it has stopped writing is which step?
- practice Guessing that the refill has run dry is which step?
- practice Which step comes right after ‘test’?
- practice Which step comes first: ‘question’ or ‘observe’?
Answers
- Observe, question, guess, test, work out what the test showed.
- Observe.
- Guess.
- D — work out what the test showed.
- Observe comes first — a question is only asked about something you have already observed.
This exercise gives a short, new situation set in a village shop, not a classroom or a laboratory. It asks you to name which step of the method is happening at each point in it.
The steps are the same ones from the pen and the tyre — only the situation this time is new.
- practice A shopkeeper notices that the biscuit packets on the top shelf keep going soft, while the ones on the lower shelf stay crisp. Which step is this?
- practice She asks herself, ‘why do only the top shelf packets go soft?’ Which step is this?
- practice She guesses that the top shelf sits too close to a window and warms up in the sun. Which step is this?
- practice She moves one packet away from the window for a week and checks whether it stays crisp. Which step is this?
- practice The moved packet stays crisp, and she decides the window’s warmth was the cause. Which step is this?
Answers
- Observe.
- Question.
- Guess.
- D — Test.
- Work out what the test showed.
This exercise practises sorting short statements into observations and conclusions, drawn from the pen, tyre, and bulb examples already in this chapter.
A statement that only reports what was seen is an observation. One that says what it means is a conclusion.
- practice ‘The bicycle tube has a small hole near the valve.’ Is this an observation or a conclusion?
- practice ‘The tyre keeps losing air because of a puncture.’ Is this an observation or a conclusion?
- practice ‘The bulb did not light when tested in a lamp that was already working.’ Is this an observation or a conclusion?
- practice ‘The bulb itself is faulty, not the switch.’ Is this an observation or a conclusion?
- practice ‘The pen refill is still full’ and ‘the ink has dried inside the nib’ are a pair from this chapter. Which one is the observation?
Answers
- Observation — it is a plain record of what was seen.
- Conclusion — it is what the observation is taken to mean.
- Observation.
- B — Conclusion.
- ‘The pen refill is still full’ is the observation. The dried-ink line is the conclusion drawn from it.
This exercise is the activity itself: pick something ordinary at home, run the whole method on it alone, and record what happened. There is no separate materials list, because the method needs none.
Nobody needs to check your work for you — the method itself, run honestly, is the check.
- practice Pick one ordinary thing at home that puzzles you. Maybe a tap drips, one corner of a room stays cool, or a particular pot always boils over first. Observe it, and turn what puzzles you into a question. Write a guess that names something you can actually check. Test the guess with whatever is already at hand, and write down what you observed and what you concluded, as two separate lines.
- practice Read back your own guess before you test it. Does it name something you could actually go and check, or does it just sound confident? If it only sounds confident, rewrite it before testing.
Answers
- There is no single correct answer here, since the thing you choose is your own. Check your own work against this list instead: did you write down what you observed before deciding what it meant? Is your guess something a test could actually rule in or out? Are the observation and the conclusion written as two separate lines, not blended into one sentence? If all three are yes, you have run the method correctly, whatever your topic turned out to be.
- A checkable guess names something you could look at, feel, or compare — like ‘the tap washer has worn out’. An unchecked one only asserts an outcome with nothing to examine, like ‘the tap is just old’. If your first guess was the second kind, rewrite it to point at something specific enough to look at.
- practice You want to find out why the tap in your kitchen drips. Which of these two guesses could you actually go and check: ‘the washer inside the tap has worn out’? Or is it ‘the tap is old, and old things always go wrong’?
- practice While testing why the tap drips, you first notice that water still drips every few seconds even when the tap is fully closed. Is this an observation or a conclusion, and what might you conclude from it afterward?
- practice One reader tests why a tap drips, and another tests why a room’s corner stays cool. Their results are different. What should be the same about how each of them records the work, no matter what they are testing?
Answers
- A — the washer inside the tap has worn out. This names something you can open the tap and look at; being old and things going wrong names nothing specific you could check.
- This is an observation — a plain record of what you saw. A conclusion you might draw from it afterward is that the washer inside the tap has worn out.
- Both should write down what they actually observed first, and decide what it means only afterward. The observation and the conclusion should be recorded as two separate lines, not blended into one sentence. The specific finding is different each time, but keeping the observation and the conclusion apart is the same every time.
This exercise practises catching the chapter’s two traps. One trap is thinking that real science needs a laboratory. The other is thinking that a wrong guess means the method failed. Both traps are practised inside short scenarios, where a person is talking themselves out of trusting their own work.
Neither trap is true — equipment-free testing still counts as science, and a ruled-out guess is still progress.
- practice A student works out whether a lamp’s bulb or its switch is at fault by trying a bulb she knows works. She gets a clear answer, but then thinks the test cannot be real science because she used no equipment. What is wrong with her thinking?
- practice A student guesses that a flat tyre is losing air through the valve, tests it, and finds the valve is fine. The leak is somewhere else. He feels he has failed the activity. What would you tell him?
- practice Which of these two students is thinking correctly?
- practice A student says they could not answer their question by evening, so there is no point keeping it. Which idea from this chapter corrects this?
Answers
- She is wrong. A laboratory is one place science happens, not the only one — her equipment-free bulb-and-switch test is a genuine example of working like a scientist.
- A wrong guess is not a failure. It rules out one explanation and points toward the next one to try — the method is working exactly as it should.
- Student B.
- A question that still has no answer should be kept for later, not dropped. Not every question gets answered in the same year it is asked.