Varieties of Experimental Research

To experiment is to try, to look for, to confirm. A familiar exam­ple may make the meaning clear. After getting ready in the morn­ing to go to the office, I look for the keys. I can’t find them. I am mildly agitated. Thoughts of not getting to the office, of not get­ting the notes I wrote yesterday, of going late or empty-handed to class, and so forth, run quickly through my mind. But I know the first thing I need to do is look for my keys. I run up again to my bedroom and look in the same chest of drawers where I keep them every night. Not there. I look in the next drawer. Not there either. Then, I recollect that I was watching TV last night. I go into the TV room and look on the TV table and places near about. Not there. Then, I think of the clothes I wore yesterday. I go to the closet, recollect what I wore, and search the pockets. Not there. Did I, by any chance, leave them in the car when I got out of it yesterday? I look through the locked door of the car. Not there. Then, I remember that I needed the keys to lock the door; so, I decide, because the doors are locked now, there is no chance that the keys are inside the car. I go back into the house and ask others in the family if any of them have seen my keys. They start, half-heartedly, looking for them. In the meanwhile, I go up to the bedroom, rehearse in my mind—even partly, physically and orally—how I came into the house yesterday, where and how I keep my briefcase, where and how I removed my jacket and shoes, how I was called to eat dinner soon after, how I did not fully change my clothes before going to the table, and so forth. I go through the places involved, look at all surfaces on which I could have placed the keys, step by step in sequence. I even open the refrigerator and look inside—just in case. My frustration, of course, is mounting steadily.

At this stage, the reader may object that this is all searching; where is the experiment? Indeed, it is searching, but searching with a difference. The difference is that the search is not haphaz­ard; it is not arbitrary. Frantic though it appears, it is systematic; it is organized. It was done with one question in mind all the time: Can my keys be here? The search is not extended every­where: to the bathrooms, the attic, the basement, the backyard, or even to other bedrooms. It is done only in places where the keys are likely to be. The circumstances that could cause them to be in selected places are thought about. To use a more precise lan­guage, it is a search directed by one or more hypotheses.

If my boy wants to collect seashells, I will take him to the sea­shore, not to the zoo. If he wants to collect pinecones, I advise him to wait until late fall, then to go and look under pine trees, not under any tree in the park. Every parent, with some sense, does the same. Primitive as they seem, these are logical decisions: to search with a question in mind and to do so at a time and place and under the circumstances likely to yield a favorable answer.

I am aware that these examples are not adequate in strength to reach the textbook definition of “experiment,” but these are experiments, nonetheless. Very famous scientific works, like the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, which was hailed as one of the greatest achievements of mathematical astronomy, not­withstanding all the work it involved in mathematics and astron­omy, is eventually a search. Many theoretical calculations were obviously needed to direct the search at a particular location in the vast sky at a particular time. But is it far-fetched to call the search for the object itself an experiment?

If the above is an example of a deliberate search, backed by an expectation, there are instances in the world of science in which unexpected happenings led to discoveries of monumental scale. Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays and Alexander Fleming’s discovery of antibiotics are, to outsiders, just accidents. But such accidents can happen only to those who are prepared to perceive things that most of us do not. The culture of the mind of those scientists was such that they could decipher meaning in these “accidents”; they could expect answers to questions they were prepared to ask, even if they had not consciously asked them yet. The preparation of their minds embodies the question; the acci­dents, the answers. The accidental discoveries, subject to further confirmation or variation, become part of science.

The training of athletes is another example of experiment. Several timed runs of a sprinter, several shots to the hoop of the basketball player, under repetitive conditions and often with intentional variations, are answers to the combined questions, Can I do it again? Can I do it better? The housewife’s cookies, the chef’s old and new dishes, the old and new styles of dress items, new creations in art, music, and literature: all are, in a sense, experiments backed by hypotheses. Logic is implied, if not expressed, in each. That the word “research” ends with “search” is, quite likely, purposive.

Even the zest of the gambler—with various games, combina­tions, and numbers—is not devoid of logic, though often, when it comes to detail and when it is too late, he recognizes that logic worked, not for, but against him.

Source: Srinagesh K (2005), The Principles of Experimental Research, Butterworth-Heinemann; 1st edition.