I am starting this thread because so many others have taken such interesting turns and, on some ocassions, been threadjacked, sometimes by me. I hesitate to post it in "Personal Experiences" because it is most certainly not a personal experience, but I don't know what would be a better area.
The purpose here is to clear up a lot of confusion about what science and the scientific method ARE and are NOT.
Science is a method for investigating observations, gaining knowledge, correcting knowledge. It is based on observing and measuring the world around us. Based on the observations, a hypothesis is developed. A hypothesis is suggested explantion of the observations and measurements you have taken. Any hypothesis should also be able to make predictions, such as the predictions of gravity bending light in general relativity.
Also, any good test of a hypothesis should be repeatable, verifiable by outside people and falsifiable. Falsifiability does not mean that something is false but, rather that IF it is false then it is possible to conceive of an experiment, test or observation that shows it to be false. For example, if a hypothesis was "water is always boils at 100 degrees Celcius", then the experiment could be falsified by changing conditions, such as the air pressure.
Others can repeat the experiment, check the testing method, verify the results, check for mistakes.
Science REQUIRES an open mind, openess to new ideas and skepticism, everything is underpinned with the idea of "Prove it" using the method described above.
With regards to some of the things I have heard, like "science is just like the WTBS, what science 'knows', like the sun orbiting the earth, changes", I want to address that. First, the scientifict method is NOT all that old. A lot of what people "knew" was not "known" scientificially. Yes, it was based on observation, but without the tools to investigate the observations.
Second, of course what we "know" will change. That's the whole point! To act as if that is a failing of science is to have absolutely no understanding of science. It's NOT to prove what we know, but to learn more. Sometimes that overturns existing knowledge. That's not only expected, but damned exciting when it happens. It means we learned something new on the journey.
Now, as to what the scientific method is not... 1)Personal revelation 2)Ideas with no way to measure or test 3)defaulting to "you can't prove it's false so my idea must be true, i.e., the galaxy is sentient.
Hypothesis MUST be at least internally consistent, meaning mathematically or physically sound. A hypothesis is invalid on it's face if one of the logical conclusions is that 1+1=3 or that Christ = Light = the mass of the universe (one of the logical conclusions of that is that Christ must be winding down since light is escaping the known universe). If a hypothesis is NOT internally and logically consistent or has unproveable portions, it is absolutely invalid.
Finally, a few quick words on "theory". A theory in common parlance does NOT mean the same thing as "theory" in scientific parlance. In common usage, a theory is the equivalent of "I have an idea" or a hypothesis, a suspicion. In science, a theory is the highest attainable status, it has been tested over and over, it is falsifiable, it has proven predictive powers and works over and over.
I hope that explains science a little better. Discuss!