– I record my results in my lab book (this is a legal requirement).
– When I have enough results, I analyse them. Sometimes this means entering them into a computer and doing tests.
– When I think I know what the results mean, I publish the results in a scientific journal. Before the work gets published, it needs to be checked and given the okay by two other science experts who also work on what I study
– Not many people who aren’t scientists read science journals. So I think it’s important to talk to other people, including the media, school students and the general public about my results in ways they can understand.
Well, you often do an experiment because you’re asking a question.
So I might ask “Does coffee give me a headache?” A regular person would think about all the times they had drunk coffee and maybe give an answer. A scientist would also think about that, but then say “hang on, we need to test this”. So they would design experiments. The experiments you are doing are meant to be answering a question. So I’d make coffee, drink it and wait. If I get a headache, maybe it’s the coffee? So I’d do the same experiment the next day. If I get another headache, then my “Coffee-headache” theory is looking pretty good.
But then the next day someone comes along and says – “actually I get a headache from sitting in my chair.” So then I’d have to go back and check that my chair wasn’t the problem, or that I don’t get headaches anyway without coffee, or that I’m not getting a headache from writing too many answers to questions on websites…
So the answer to your question is: you write down what you do, and then you think. You think of the next experiment you need to do to test some idea. Then you do those experiments and you then have to think some more.
Sometimes this can take years, sometimes days. At the end, you combine the results together to support some statement like “Coffee causes headaches” and you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are right. You have to write everything down as proof you did all these experiments so that someone else can check it.
As Bridget says, you don’t just stop there. You write about it all in a formal thing called a “paper”. This is checked by people, then it appears in public in a “journal”. These are all on the web and you can sometimes read the papers. Google PLoS One – you can read all the papers there. Here’s one of mine: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0017446. These papers contain a lot of jargon – words you won’t understand, but they’re just words. The ideas are usually very simple – it’s just the language that’s specialised. Even when these things have appeared in public, other scientists can still criticise or comment on the papers.
We publish a few papers like this each year, telling the rest of the world about the things we have discovered. Sometimes someone will write a book about something, or a textbook, but these are usually summaries of discoveries that are reported first in scientific papers.
Like Mat and Bridget have said we have to record and analyse the results to see if they answer the question we were asking. If you get something really good then you might be able to publish it. Usually when I get a result I see if I understand what it means, then check with my supervisor to make sure I’m on the right track. Then you can decide what the next experiment you need to do is.
Unfortunately for me though, a lot of my results have been rubbish, so they definitely have not answered the question. Best place for them is the bin! Nah joking, you have to keep them anyway because you don’t want to forget what you’ve done and keep repeating the same thing.
The main thing about experiments is that they test whether our ideas are right or wrong. So the main thing is to use that information to improve our ideas. If every single test that we can think of seems to agree with our ideas, it doesn’t prove that we are ABSOLUTELY right, but that to the best of our knowledge, we are right. As Bridget, Matt and Aimee have written, there are formal procedures for recording and communicating our results.
The first reaction I have to the information I receive from my experiments is always the same. I think to myself, “This had better make sense.” But for things to make sense, I need to record the results into a lab book or chart. They need to be written down somewhere.
From there I start to look for patterns. This could be something that I expect to see because someone else’s experiment behaved in a certain way. It could be for something that I predicted and I just want to know whether I was right or wrong.
After that I make graphs out of the information because everyone loves to see a graph. Though seriously sometimes seeing a graph of the information makes much more sense than reading numbers on a page.
And finally after I’ve made sense of it all, I write a report. Where this report goes depends on what I found and who wants to read it. When I worked in a lab that was a business, the report went to the client. In research, the report went to my supervisor and the client. I haven’t had anything published yet because most of the science I did was done in secret and to make money and I can’t even talk about it even to this day because I’m not allowed to.
– I record my results in my lab book (this is a legal requirement).
– When I have enough results, I analyse them. Sometimes this means entering them into a computer and doing tests.
– When I think I know what the results mean, I publish the results in a scientific journal. Before the work gets published, it needs to be checked and given the okay by two other science experts who also work on what I study
– Not many people who aren’t scientists read science journals. So I think it’s important to talk to other people, including the media, school students and the general public about my results in ways they can understand.
0
Well, you often do an experiment because you’re asking a question.
So I might ask “Does coffee give me a headache?” A regular person would think about all the times they had drunk coffee and maybe give an answer. A scientist would also think about that, but then say “hang on, we need to test this”. So they would design experiments. The experiments you are doing are meant to be answering a question. So I’d make coffee, drink it and wait. If I get a headache, maybe it’s the coffee? So I’d do the same experiment the next day. If I get another headache, then my “Coffee-headache” theory is looking pretty good.
But then the next day someone comes along and says – “actually I get a headache from sitting in my chair.” So then I’d have to go back and check that my chair wasn’t the problem, or that I don’t get headaches anyway without coffee, or that I’m not getting a headache from writing too many answers to questions on websites…
So the answer to your question is: you write down what you do, and then you think. You think of the next experiment you need to do to test some idea. Then you do those experiments and you then have to think some more.
Sometimes this can take years, sometimes days. At the end, you combine the results together to support some statement like “Coffee causes headaches” and you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are right. You have to write everything down as proof you did all these experiments so that someone else can check it.
As Bridget says, you don’t just stop there. You write about it all in a formal thing called a “paper”. This is checked by people, then it appears in public in a “journal”. These are all on the web and you can sometimes read the papers. Google PLoS One – you can read all the papers there. Here’s one of mine: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0017446. These papers contain a lot of jargon – words you won’t understand, but they’re just words. The ideas are usually very simple – it’s just the language that’s specialised. Even when these things have appeared in public, other scientists can still criticise or comment on the papers.
We publish a few papers like this each year, telling the rest of the world about the things we have discovered. Sometimes someone will write a book about something, or a textbook, but these are usually summaries of discoveries that are reported first in scientific papers.
0
Like Mat and Bridget have said we have to record and analyse the results to see if they answer the question we were asking. If you get something really good then you might be able to publish it. Usually when I get a result I see if I understand what it means, then check with my supervisor to make sure I’m on the right track. Then you can decide what the next experiment you need to do is.
Unfortunately for me though, a lot of my results have been rubbish, so they definitely have not answered the question. Best place for them is the bin! Nah joking, you have to keep them anyway because you don’t want to forget what you’ve done and keep repeating the same thing.
0
The main thing about experiments is that they test whether our ideas are right or wrong. So the main thing is to use that information to improve our ideas. If every single test that we can think of seems to agree with our ideas, it doesn’t prove that we are ABSOLUTELY right, but that to the best of our knowledge, we are right. As Bridget, Matt and Aimee have written, there are formal procedures for recording and communicating our results.
0
The first reaction I have to the information I receive from my experiments is always the same. I think to myself, “This had better make sense.” But for things to make sense, I need to record the results into a lab book or chart. They need to be written down somewhere.
From there I start to look for patterns. This could be something that I expect to see because someone else’s experiment behaved in a certain way. It could be for something that I predicted and I just want to know whether I was right or wrong.
After that I make graphs out of the information because everyone loves to see a graph. Though seriously sometimes seeing a graph of the information makes much more sense than reading numbers on a page.
And finally after I’ve made sense of it all, I write a report. Where this report goes depends on what I found and who wants to read it. When I worked in a lab that was a business, the report went to the client. In research, the report went to my supervisor and the client. I haven’t had anything published yet because most of the science I did was done in secret and to make money and I can’t even talk about it even to this day because I’m not allowed to.
0