A Beginner’s Guide to the Scientific Method

1. When matching the experimental and control groups, can you switch subjects between the two groups or do you eliminate them both?

2. How were the margin of error percentiles derived? Are those percentiles universal?

3. Is is acceptable to combine a retrospective and randomized experiment to solidify your findings?

4. Some experiments show enough consistency to draw a conclusion are later found to be false. Is this a result of poor experimental process or a wrongful explanation?

5. When fallacies are found, is the error due to simply a lack of knowledge?

6. Pseudoscience can be a result of omission of fact. Since science is based upon infinitely detailed facts to which we will never understand in entirety, wouldn’t everything be pseudoscience?

7. Would theory be categorized as science or pseudoscience? Why?

8. What is causal research and what is correlation and what is the difference?

9. Explain margin of error?

10. In testing explanations, what are causal mechanisms?

11. How much evidence is necessary before theories are considered valid?

12. How is science defined?

13. Do all scientists think there is a logical explanation for everything? Is there a possibility that some things just cannot be explained?

14. If there are intelligent beings out there, can it be possible that they found a way to overcome the laws of physics (page 45)?

15. What is the correlation between fertility and strenuous exercise?

16. Does mental telepathy actually exit? (page 66 and 67)

17. What causes Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome (page 82)?

18. Why is it that children of incest carry a higher risk than others of mental retardation, physical deformity, and early death due to recessive genes? What is metnal retardation caused by then? (page 84)

19. Are Nostradamus’s predictions correct, or is it just the way we interpret them?

20. How many medical studies contain small sample sizes? How valid are the results from these experiments?

21. Is there a way to identify a specific cause(s) in the decline of SAT scores, because of the multitude of possible causes and the lack of data?

22. When talking about possible sample results, the 5% margin of error is used. Is there something specific about this percentage, or is it somewhat arbitrary?

23. Based on the criteria that make up a pseudoscience, why exactly is psychology a pseudoscience if has been a big part of understanding why humans act the way humans do?

24. If pseudoscience attributes to society as much as science, why does the book make it seem that some of these subjects are not as important or carry similar recognition.

25. Are there anomalies that haven’t bee proven right or wrong, and why haven’t they if there are?

26. The book talks about dowsers, and how they have countless excuses for if and when they don’t find water when being tested or watched by scientists. Why bother investigating these people when researchers know they will never have hard proof that dowers exist or don’t exist?

27. The subject of anomalies, fallacies and non-anomalous explanations are a bit confusing to me.