Importance of the Scientific Method

The fact that science is basically a problem solving process has not been taught enough and thus the public is not sufficiently familiar with this concept. Science is its method so it follows naturally that the scientific method is a problem solving method. Keep this in mind at all times and you have the main big picture of science – that science is its method.

Here are a few quotes to support this:

From The Nature of Scientific Thought (1963) by Marshall Walker

The scientific method is a survival technique that first appeared in primitive form in the first organism that included a memory. As the brain and nervous system increased in complexity through evolutionary processes, the sophistication of the scientific method increased. Man has the most complex brain and nervous system known, and the scientific method in its most sophisticated form is used by man as he strives for survival and comfort.

From The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn

Because the unit of scientific achievement is the solved problem and because the group knows well which problems have already been solved, few scientists will easily be persuaded to adopt a viewpoint that again opens to question many problems that had previously been solved. Nature itself must first undermine professional security by making prior achievements seem problematic. Furthermore, even when that has occurred and a new candidate for paradigm has been evoked, scientists will be reluctant to embrace it unless convinced that two all-important conditions are being met. First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem-solving ability that has accrued to science through its predecessors.

Teaching the Scientific Method

A strange situation exists. The scientific method is essentially the best and most reliable of all problem solving and decision making methods, but because of misunderstandings about it, the scientific method is hardly taught at all in our schools, including colleges and universities. This situation is what I have termed

The Biggest Educational and Intellectual Blunder in History

If I am correct about this, then great opportunities are available to our educators, organizations, and people to take actions to correct the situation.