>>511424358In today's world many people characterize themselves as being "scientists".
Only those who always carefully follow the scientific method are deserving of that title.
Scientists are distinguishable from artists, poets, musicians, and others in that they use what is known as the "scientific method".
It is not that "inspiration" or "the muse" is not valuable in science, it is but it is not the starting point of what we call science.
In the process called the scientific method a true scientist will:
>observe nature and carefully record what is seen.>seek patterns in the observed data, put numbers on the data, fit equations to those numbers.>generalize those equations into a word description of the process - this is a hypothesis.>carry out experiments and/or gather independent data to see how well the hypothesis predicts future observations and results. This is called "closing the loop" on your hypothesis.>reject, or modify the hypothesis if the experiments show it falls short of success in these predictions.>only after the results of several experiments have been successfully predicted by the hypothesis, can it be called a theory.If two different theories predict a given phenomenon equally well, the simpler theory is probably the best one.
this principle is called Occams Razor.
theories can never be proven to be correct, some other mechanism entirely may be the cause of the observed data.
but theories can be disproved if they fail to predict the outcomes of additional experiments.
such theories are termed to be falsified.
Sometimes the scientific method as described above is called the "empirical method".
