Science is guided by the vast body of scientific laws which have been established through careful experimentation over the past 300 years. Although there is no precise prescription for doing science, there is a general scheme for doing science which is shown in the figure below. Science begins when a natural phenomenon is observed that raises a question for which there is no known answer. Doing science involves thinking of ways to explain the natural phenomenon and answering the question raised. The various explanations invented by a scientist involve a creative process which is based on one’s own personal experiences as well as known scientific laws and theories. Thinking of the initial question to ask about the observed phenomenon, and all conceivable explanations (or hypotheses) to explain the phenomenon are among the most creative moments in doing science.

A hypothesis is based on one's personal life experiences, and can also embody a known scientific theory or law. The combination of a theory or law which applies to the phenomenon under study plus the scientist's proposed hypothesis to explain the phenomenon is called a model. A model can be a statement of a concept, a physical model, a diagram, or a mathematical expression. The process of explaining the patterns and trends in data based on known scientific theory is called modeling the data. One reason that a model is always simpler than the actual phenomenon observed is that the theories and laws are simplifications and generalizations of the patterns observed in nature. The basic premise in science is that knowledge is advanced when a correspondence is found between the model and the observed phenomenon. What is another reason that there can never be an exact correspondence between the model and the observed phenomenon?


The foundations of scientific inquiry in the physical sciences rest on developing the skills to pose a scientific question, to develop, to test and to apply a scientific model that adequately accounts for the observed phenomena. The experiments presented as Personal Lab in this book are intended to help you develop skills of scientific inquiry.

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