Scientific Method Finding Recognizing that personal and cultural beliefs influence both our perceptions and our interpretations of natural phenomena, we aim with standard procedures and criteria to minimize those influences when developing a theory. As a famous scientist once said, "Smart people (like smart lawyers) can come up with very good explanations for mistaken points of view." In summary, the scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of bias or prejudice in the experimenter when testing a hypothesis or a theory, which are of the four following. 1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena. 2. Formulation of a hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation. 3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations. 4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments. If the experiments bear out the hypothesis, it may come to be regarded as a theory or law of nature. If the experiments do not bear out the hypothesis, it must be rejected or modified. What is important in the description of the scientific method just given is the predictive power of the hypothesis or theory, as tested by experiment. It is often said in science that theories can never be proved only disproved. There is always the possibility that a new observation or a new experiment will conflict with a long-standing theory.
In physics and other science disciplines, the words "hypothesis," "model," "theory" and "law" have different connotations in relation to the stage of acceptance or knowledge about a group of phenomena. An hypothesis is a limited statement regarding cause and effect in specific