Speaking of the scientific method
Feb. 26th, 2017 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Many people realize that testing thermonuclear weapons is better done through simulations rather than explosions. Remarkably, the same people think that testing global warming is better done in vivo, rather than simulation.
In recent years, the development of high throughput instrumentation in molecular biology and neighbouring fields has given rise to a special type of exploratory experimentation that collects and analyses very large amounts of data, and these new ‘omics’ disciplines are often said to represent a break with the ideal of hypothesis-driven science (Burian 2007; Elliott 2007; Waters 2007; O’Malley 2007) and instead described as data-driven research (Leonelli 2012; Strasser 2012) or as a special kind of “convenience experimentation” in which many experiments are done simply because they are extraordinarily convenient to perform (Krohs 2012).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/