• Question: when do you know if you found the solution to a problem.

    Asked by vorn20 to Adam, Joanna, Louise S, Louise W, Marcus on 16 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Joanna Giles

      Joanna Giles answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      Great question! in Science, we are taught that we cannot prove anything only disprove things. This might be why in School you have to come up with a “Null hypothesis” and try to disprove it:

      e.g. The presence of light will NOT affect the rate of photosynthesis

      and then you would do an experiment to show the opposite.

      So, in Science you have never really found a solution to a problem as there are so many possible answers. Instead we just try to do experiments to build up knowledge of the thing we are studying. We can never do one experiment and then say “Eureka! I’ve done it!” because there are always other explanations and the possibility we made a mistake. So even if we get an exciting result – we do tend to have to repeat it LOTS of times and in lots of different ways.

      Basically – our work is never done!

    • Photo: Louise Stanley

      Louise Stanley answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      A very good question. Quite often in science all you can say is that you have found A solution not THE solution. More often that not you get a result that tells you what the solution isn’t so you have to make another hypothesis and test that.

    • Photo: Louise Walkin

      Louise Walkin answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      Definitely agree with Louise S! A solution not the solution! There are times when you get a result that makes sense, but we always need to repeat it to make sure that we can get the same result many times. That makes our result more reliable. However, science really like to test us and solutions are never really easy to come by. Each experiment gives us more knowledge but one experiment will never give us a full solution. Thre is always more that we need to find out! 🙂

    • Photo: Adam Paige

      Adam Paige answered on 19 Nov 2012:

      The first thing to do is define the hypothesis (what you think will happen) and design an experiment to test that idea. When you get the data you have to look at it to see if everything seemed to have worked OK. Did the experiment seem to work as you expected? Did anything odd happen?

      If all seems OK, then you can analyse what the findings mean.

      Then you repeat everything again…and again…and maybe again. You have to prove the result you got was not a weird odd result, but is a typical result that you would get the same every time you repeat the experiment. You can even check this by putting all the experiments data together and using statistical analysis to show if your findings are random chance or something likely to be real.

      After all this, if you are lucky, you may feel convinced you have a true solution. Then you should look at it again with a different type of experiment, just to be certain that the result can not be explained by any other reason than the one in your hypothesis. It does take a while to be sure.

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