• Question: If a scientist comes up with an idea/theory what do they do to get it proven?

    Asked by lizziemegran to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Hi @lizziemegran
      Great question!
      When you first have an idea or a theory, you check the existing literature (academic papers published in journals) to see whether anyone has done anything similar, and what they have found. You need to have a reason for your idea really, maybe you’ve seen something in someone else’s work you think can be expanded.

      Then you’ll sit down and work out how you want to answer the question, what equipment and participants (if you work with people, like I do) you’ll need, and what data you’ll collect from them.

      At some point around this time you’ll probably need to apply for money to be able to run the experiment (that’s the boring bit, but very important!).

      Then you’ll run your experiment, and when you’ve got your data, you’ll use statistics to work out whether what you’ve found is what you’ve expected, and how confident you can be that your results show what you think they show.

      Then you’ll write it up yourself and get it reviewed by other scientists in your field, who’ll check your work for accuracy and interest, and hopefully it will get published and go on to influence other scientists to go even further!

      Hope this answers your question 🙂

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      In my part of science, we use something called probabilities to say whether a result is likely to be right or not. (When you ask a question, we don’t know anything about you, like how old you are, but, if you’re at ‘A’-Level age, you might come across them in Maths or Statistics ‘A’-Level.) So, here’s an example. You might know (especially if you’re from the North) that people in the North of England pronounce “put” (like “put it down”) and “putt” (like in golf) the same, but people from the South pronounce them differently. In phonetics I can do measurements of those vowels and find out the scientific properties of the sound-waves that make them up, so that I can attach a number to each vowel. Say that for some person I make them say “put” 50 times and then “putt” 50 times. Now I’ve got 100 numbers standing for 100 vowels, and I want to prove whether that person says “put” differently from “putt” or not. I can take the 50 numbers for “put” and do a statistical test to compare them with the 50 numbers for “putt”. The test will give me a number (the probability) which shows how likely it is that the “putt” numbers are different from the “put” numbers on average.

      But you see I’m only talking about likelihood! In linguistics we usually say that a p-number that shows that 1 “put” number in every 20 is the same as a “putt” number is good enough. That means that we say we have proved that two sets are different even if 1 in every 20 of their members are the same! Actually, it’s not possible to completely prove that something is true or not – it’s only possible to say that it is very likely or very unlikely to be true.
      In other parts of science, the 1-in-20 kind of proof that we take in linguistics is not good enough. Imagine if a 1-in-20 proof was used in medicine – that might mean that, when you tested a new drug, 19 guinea-pigs were cured after taking it but one got worse! So, in medicine, they have a much stricter standard of proof – 1-in-10,000, or even more.

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