Champaign-Urbana is finally experiencing beautiful spring weather after a brutal (for central Illinois) winter, so I spent Saturday afternoon digging out my garden and filling in the holes that my dogs have dug in the yard. As I pulled up chunks of grass + dirt, I had the idea to transplant these hunks to the newly-filled holes. The dogs have torn up a lot of our grass, and maybe I could use this as an opportunity to patch up some of the dead spots.
Will it work? I don’t know. It’s an experiment, I told myself.
Scientist-me immediately chimed in: That’s not an experiment! Where is my control group? As a scientist, I should be more careful about how I use words like “experiment.”
Then forgiving-me added soothingly: It’s ok. This is just how people use the word “experiment” when they are not doing professional science. And right now, I am not doing professional science. I am just digging in my garden. Colloquially, an experiment is just a process whose outcome is unknown. I don’t know if the grass will grow. It probably won’t. But I will just do it and see.
Scientist-me chewed this over. Wouldn’t it be nice if scientists also did not know in advance the outcomes of their experiments? When one spends a lot of time and careful thought developing theories and deriving predictions from them, it is easy to feel like one knows what the outcome will be. And this can lead to confirming what one “knows” by dropping measurements that do not verify this knowledge, changing how one calculates statistics so that one can draw the inferences one knew all along, re-running the same experiment until the conclusions align with what one knows. And each of these sources of confirmation can feel in the moment as if they are justified: Of course these data need to be dropped, the other measures were the ones that really mattered! And so on.
But that’s not science. That’s just digging.
I hope that scientist-me can learn to be a little bit more like intuitive-gardener-me: genuinely curious about the world, open-minded about the possibility that my ideas may not work (and that they are still worth testing anyway), and seriously in love with tomatoes. Ok, the tomatoes may not help my science much, but they will make me happy anyway.
