Anyway, this is a free-ish Saturday and I am thinking about how to best use it. V and I have already cleaned the apartment and our only load of laundry is almost done. It seems that I have an entire day ahead of me. YAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!
The past months have been chocked full of lab work but I am finally feeling like I can really do hypothesis driven science. Let me explain for the non-science nerd what hypothesis driven science is as opposed to other kinds.
Hypothesis driven science is when you look at all the information already available to you surrounding a certain unanswered question and then you make an educated guess to explain those observations, aka: a hypothesis. Then you design experiments to test that hypothesis. The sum total of those experiments should be enough to disprove your hypothesis. If you do disprove your hypothesis, the results should also point you to a different hypothesis to test. If you can't disprove your hypothesis you have actually succeeded in finding more supporting evidence for it, strengthening it.
Other approaches are what I call fishing trips. They are equally important but not driven by specific hypotheses. For example, the Human Genome Project was not hypothesis driven science. We had the technology to sequence a large amount of DNA, so we just did and hoped that we would find something interesting. We did find a lot of interesting things and those observations have been used to help construct real, testable hypotheses, but the actual sequence was just a bunch of nucleotides. It is the difference between counting the number of different coloured butterflies to get a statistical observation and making up a theory to explain why butterflies have their colour.
So, in conclusion, hypothesis driven science rules.
On another note, I am really feeling music lately. I love music.
Until next time, keep on truckin'.
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