Why Think Like A Scientist?

There are many reasons not to. First it’s quite hard. Then, many – especially loved ones -- will not always appreciate your attempts. Certainly, it’s no way to pick a mate or raise a very young child. You will want to leaven those endeavors with truths and understandings that rise from feelings, empathy and introspection or risk living alone and unloved.

In full science mode your questions are apt to be too probing and exacting to be socially acceptable.  Small talk, except perhaps in the company of others who think like scientists, will not come easily.  A casual question about your latest opinions may elicit a response appropriate for a doctoral dissertation.  People will drift away, preferring another drink to your company.

So when do you resort to the methodology of scientific thought?  When an issue of significance to you requires careful inquiry.  Or when there is a difference of opinion on some subject, especially if money is riding on the outcome.  In other words, you never know when the need will arise: while reading a newspaper, listening to a politician, attending church, playing the ponies or considering a wager while occupying your favorite stool in your favorite bar.
 
When being scientific you first form an hypothesis about something. An hypothesis is nothing more than a formal assertion, i.e., “wood burns only in the presence of air.” “Well, of course,” you mutter. “Everyone knows that a fireplace works best if there’s a good draw. That’s obvious.”

Well, a working fireplace is a comforting thing, but it doesn’t prove our hypothesis, which asserts that wood burns only in the presence of air. To raise our hypothesis to the next level, that of a theory, we must experiment. We can throw burning wood into water. We can build a good blaze and dump a load of dirt on it.

So far so good. We have demonstrated that wood fires go out or won’t even start if earth and water replaces air. But will it burn in a vacuum? In the absence of air? Things get a little more elaborate now. We lower a large vessel over our fire, make it air tight and proceed to pump the air out of it. Since we are doing what is technically known as a “thought experiment” we may assume the availability of a large transparent globe strong enough to not implode when the air is pumped out of it. .

Naturally, since Murphy's Law, as amended, is still in effect (“In any serious endeavor anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.”), the pump fails the work. But while the technician fiddles with the pump, science can go on. Suddenly we note that the fire flickers and dies even though we have not pumped out the air!

If, instead of muttering curses at the oaf who built the fire and urging the technician to hurry with the pump, we wonder why the fire flickered and died, we will have truly thought like a scientist. A scientist sees what is there, even if it is unwelcome, and wonders why, even in the face of disappointment.

If we then dispatch the technician off to the pump repair shop and meanwhile repeat what we just did many times, meticulously measuring how long the same size fire lasts with varying sizes of glass globes (or vice versa), we will take our scientific act to the next level, that of measurement and quantification.

Once our results are neatly tabulated we can easily deduce that there is a high correlation between the volume of air available to a wood fire and the time it will last. Next, a good scientist will pose new questions. Why do fires go out in the absence of air? What is air anyway? What, for that matter, is fire?  Why does it die down overnight, making the camp cold just when we need it the most to brew coffee in the morning?

In the context of history, by those questions we have just relived the times in which the ancient formulations of the Greeks (all things are made of earth, air, fire and water) and the alchemy of the Middle Ages (how to make gold from baser metals)  gave way to the enlightened 1700's when Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier founded modern chemistry with the discovery of oxygen.

So far we know to formulate and test an hypothesis to see if it is worthy of being called a theory. In the process we may note the first limitation of science: not all theories are testable. Example: it is often claimed that democratic nations never war against each other. History on the record appears to confirm this hypothesis, even though a rigorous, repeatable experiment is impossible to conduct even with the active help of the UN.  All it would take is one instance in which two democratic nations went to war against each other to torpedo our theory.

But we didn’t set out to do science, only to consider thinking like a scientist. Doing so means adopting both the methods and the attitudes of science.  So far, our examples illustrate the scientific method: how to form, test  and retest in order to approve or disprove an hypothesis and elevate it to a theory or discard it.  But scientists are dudes with attitudes, too.

The principle attitudes those who would think like a scientist need to bring to the table are: disinterestedness; naivete; openness; fidelity to the facts;  meticulous observation and measurement, a willingness to change her mind when a pet theory is falsified. and a willingness to take the trouble to think quantitatively.

Disinterestedness.  No, a scientist is not indifferent to what he thinks or does, but he cannot identify too closely and emotionally with the hypotheses he is testing lest his ego wrap itself around one pet outcome.  Failure, he must always remember, advances learning, too.

Naivete.  It was a child after all that first noticed that the Emperor had no clothes.  Too often, as this story teaches, the eye sees what the brain -- trained by experience -- expects it to see, overlooking what is really -- or also -- there. 

Openness.  When Galileo invited minions of the Catholic faith to observe the four circling moons of Jupiter through his telescope, some refused and others denied the evidence as obviously a hoax.  Closer to home, some among us today find it easier to deny the moonwalks of Neil Armstrong than to accept these startling images as real and to expand their world view enough to account for them.

Fidelity to Facts.  Your opinion may be an hypothesis but it is not fact, merely an unsupported assertion, no matter how loudly or often it is stated.   The politician's half truth is not a fact.  A statement that the federal government is "broke" is an opinion.  A statement that the federal government owes more than ever and therefore that is bad, is a half truth mixed with an opinion.  If you say that the federal government owes more relative to GDP than ever before and therefore owes too much, that is a half truth.  Show that the feds owe more relative to GDP than ever before and that the interest rate it must pay to borrow more is also rising and you have a fact that supports a conclusion that the country owes too much.

Observe and Measure.  Since we are not actually scientists in a well equipped lab our powers of observation are limited by what we see and our ability to measure with household tools.  This limits  the precision of our data.  "I saw it with my own eyes," does not prove the existence of UFOs and, increasingly, is seen as unreliable in court cases.  The old workman's adage, "measure twice, cut once," displays the proper degree of humility and skepticism.

Change Your Mind.  Said Ralph Waldo Emerson: " A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
It is also the bane of good scientific thinking.  Sociologist Thomas Kuhn found that takes about 30 years for an established scientific field to complete a "paradigm shift" from one dominant set of theoretical constructs to another -- the time it takes for the old guys to die off.  It is hard on the ego for leaders in any field of endeavor to admit that what they have studied and staked their reputation on has been superseded, or even falsified.  Because all we want to do is think like a scientist, not make a career out of it, it should be easier for us admit error, change our mind and move on.  Luck with that; it's the right thing to do.

Think Quantitatively.  To paraphrase an old movie, if I could whisper one word of advice in your ear that word would be, not plastics, but statistics.  Read a book, take a course, learn basic statistical analysis.  What are the measures of central tendency?  How do you calculate and use the measure of dispersion?  The coefficient of correlation?  An adequate sample?  Understand and apply these techniques and you will never read a newspaper the same again.

By now I hope the original question has been answered.  Think like a scientist to understand your world and perhaps even make a little sense out of it.  To know what you don't know, which is after all the first goal of the intelligent human.  To know more as you grow in age and experience.  To, perhaps, before going however softly into that good night, achieve a measure of wisdom.

Suggested reading:

"Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences," John Allen Paulos, 135 pp, Farr, Strauss and Giroux, 1988.

"The Pleasure of Finding Things Out," Richard P. Feynman, 270 pp, Persus Books, 1999.

"How We Know: Exploration of the Scientific Process," Martin and Inge Goldstein, 357 pp, Plenium Press, 1978.

Science: The Glorious Entertainment," Jacques Barzun, 322 pp, Harper and Row, 1964.

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Thomas S. Kuhn, 210 pp, The University of Chicago Press, 1970