Weekly Blogpost #29

Friday, April 4th, 2014

Thoughts arising from an experiment on "Index of Refraction"

I am sitting here, with my sister, helping her finish a lab report on an experiment testing the correlation between the index of refraction and the angle of refraction. (As a side note, in case the scientific terminology is throwing off, the index of refraction is the "velocity at which light passes through a medium", and the refraction is the passage or deviation of light off a surface. Or something on that order - I am not a physics person, and never completed an in-depth physics course.) And while I help her go through the "proper organization of a lab report," questions keep popping up in my head, as I have flashbacks to the good times when I had to spend lovely hours and hours, sometimes for two or three days, writing a lab report on the female guppy mating preferences or the proliferation of a fruit fly population with the ratio of the different manifested phenotypes (and genotypes).

The scientific method has been devised to conduct experiments in the most controlled and properly ordered manner as possible. Experimenters nowadays, whether from natural or human sciences, use the scientific method to conduct their researches, and further their understanding of a phenomenon or expand upon an ongoing study. I am not saying that the scientific method is wrong, and that all research conducted in accordance to the scientific method is flawed. However, I do think that it is in use because it is the best that we have for now. In other words, it is not perfect (if perfection exists, that is).

For example, as I conducted experiments, I would always repeat treatments, because more trials increase the chances of eliminating or identifying skewed data. However, along my trials, I would often realize more fallacies in the set-up of the experiment, such as variables to control. The problem would be that I could not change the faults, because that would change the controlled variables of my experiments and therefore affect my data. Even though I found faults, I could not modify my experiment, because that would mean the repetition of the entire experiment, which was not possible in the class time limits constraining me. Of course, others could say that I should have come later, and dedicate hours afterschool to correct my mistakes. But then, isn't there a possibility of me finding more errors to correct? Would there ever be a point of perfection I could reach to my satisfaction? Might I not fall in a pattern of starting-again's that captures in an eternal cycle of unfinished experiments?

Well, I guess that is what science is about though. Science asks that we identify whether the initial hypothesis was supported or rejected, and the mistakes or areas of improvement that could be used for later. Science leaves the space, and encourages (or pressures?), the experimenters to continue their experiment, to fall into an eternal cycle of the search for truth. Science, as we had discussed in class, is based on the assumptions that have been proven to not be false, as opposed to be proven true.

I wonder, does this characteristic of scientific study make science a reliable source of knowledge? Science is the best knowledge we have of its kind, yet are people not often forgetting the somewhat ephemeral reliablity science has? Aren't people often in equivocation of the possibility that a fact (which had been proven to not be untrue) might suddenly be found completely false in the near future, whether tomorrow or in a year or in a century?

As I sit and help the write-up of this lab report, I wonder how people grew to trust science so much. Yes, most knowledge classified as scientific has undergone thorough investigation and all, but it is often things that we do not "see" or perceive with our own senses. I mean, we just assume, take things for granted, that there is bacteria everywhere (for example), or that there are molecules composing the water we are drinking. We had finished off the section on Perception by asking "What would life be if perceiving was not believing?". And now I ask myself that, yes, although we are perceiving science to a certain extent, we do not have the absolute confirmed certainty of its occurrence; therefore, how did our heavy reliance on science grow?