As seen in chapter #3 without the proper tools logic alone cannot provide a good description of reality, the man explanation is not sufficient. The first in history to realise that we cannot accurately describe nature by just thinking really hard was Aristotle, he thought one must test how nature behaves before conceiving a model of it.

For this reason many believe Aristotle is the father of the scientific method, but consider this:
Aristotle thought that given two objects, the first one heavier than the second one, the first one should fall faster because it is in its nature to do so.

The Experiment

Think for a second and imagine to let a bowling ball and a feather fall from the same height, which will hit the ground first?

Source

According to Aristotle the bowling ball, but Galileo Galilei found out something different.
He of course did not test his theory with a bowling ball (bowling was not a trend in Italy at that time), but the legend says he dropped at the same two different objects from the tower of Pisa time discovering that falling objects accelerate toward the ground at the same speed.
Later Sir Isaac Newton will explain why.

Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, Johannes Kepler, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Nicolaus Faraday, Neils Bohr, James Clerk Maxwell, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Nikola Tesla, Pierre Simon de Laplace… These are few of the enormous number of scientists who contributed to our society.
Many of them made huge discoveries in their fields by accident, many with years of dedicated work instead, but all of them gave to humanity the greatest contribution: the continuous improvement of the scientific method.

The Power of collective Knowledge

(when used right)

The modern scientific method has some rigid standards and it is divided in these steps:

Source

This is a simplified diagram, if you need a more accurate description of the scientific method you can follow this fantastic link.

This method allowed us to create standards in every discipline so that we could finally build a framework to use for each one. Whether the scientist is a physicist, a biologist, a chemist or works in another field, everyone follow the same rules. Moreover the result of the work of every scientist must be analyzed through a process called “peer review” which allows the result to be tested by other scientists around the globe.
As a result, the network of scientific models and frameworks forms a relatively unified picture of nature.

So the scientific method, since it is based on testing and experimenting events in the real world, should allow us to have an accurate description of reality and make predictions.
But this method alone can still fail….because humans make mistakes.
In the next chapter we’ll see how this happens, how we can prevent errors and we’ll close the series focusing our attention on how understanding nature influence our everyday life.

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Super-Duper Important Footnote

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