Is the Scientific Method as Crucial as We Believe? Maybe Not, a New Study Suggests
Its three pillars — observation, experimentation, and hypothesis testing — are considered essential requirements for rigorously investigating natural phenomena, ensuring replicability, and systematically building reliable and objective knowledge.
The study, authored by Alexander Krauss of the London School of Economics, was published in the journal PNAS Nexus on March 12.
The data set included 533 Nobel Prize-winning discoveries and 228 other major discoveries recognized in scientific literature.
Specifically, 6% of these discoveries did not involve observation, 23% did not include experimentation, and 17% did not test a hypothesis.
Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity in 1905, for instance, revolutionized our understanding of space and time through mathematical reasoning rather than direct experimentation.
Similarly, the 1953 discovery of the double helix structure of DNA by James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin relied on X-ray crystallography images, without traditional hypothesis testing or experimentation.
