The Personal Blog of Stephen Sekula

The Scientific Method

My dad is a high school chem teacher in CT, and has always been a huge influence on me as a scientist and educator. I was browsing his class notes from the first week of school, and ran across the “old standard” I love to see: THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.


I wonder how many science teachers at any level express this in the first week of school? It was common to my experience, but is this common to all children in grade school? Do they see this?

Without this diagram, one cannot learn what science is, and what it is not. Those who approach intelligent design as a “competitor” for the theory of evolution would do well to consider this diagram closely. All scientific theories have proceeded by this method, and have been vetted by experiment. Where are the experiments that can test for the designer, whose identity cannot be specified? They’ve made the hypothesis, but in ten years where is the science?