Science and technology has developed in the last 150 years and still continues to develop. In 150 years, many things have changed. Approaches to scientific thought and it's necessities, justification of the knowledge, consistency of gathered information over the years... All of them have changed but still there are some which have not been altered yet.
What are they? This is open to approaches, ideas and thoughts. I allege that, they are the methods that the scientists have used. To my opinion, the methods that scientists use have five basic characteristics.
- Behavior must be observable because only the observable behaviour can be measured. Observer must be able to clearly determine whether the behavior is occurring, count the occurrences of the behavior and time the duration of the behavior. Behaviors which have a discrete beginning and ending are the easiest to measure. Measurements and interpretations must be unambiguous.
- The methods and data must be objective. That is, the opinions of the experimenters must enter into the gathering and interpreting of data as little as possible. Besides objectiveness, data must be verifiable and clearly understandable. Data must be precisely defined.
- The procedures must be repeatable. Other individuals who wish to do the same experiment or expand upon the data must be able to do so. The level of repeatability changes by depending on the experiment.
- Scientists must be able to communicate the results to others. They often do this at scientific meetings or through articles in professional journals. In the advent of computer technology, all results spread over the world in just seconds.
- Experiments must use a systematic approach. This means that they must follow an orderly arrangement of procedures. They must stick to a fixed plan that they determine before starting the experiment. This rules out the likelihood of the fact that scientists approach the problem haphazardly. Thus, it enables and guarantees to find the correct results with an analytical approach.
