An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

The process by which scientists, collectively and over time, endeavor to construct an accurate (that is, reliable, consistent, and non-arbitrary) representation of the world.
The scientific method has four steps:

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
   

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
   

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
   

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.
   

If the experiments bear out the hypothesis it may come to be regarded as a theory or law of nature. If the experiments do not bear out the hypothesis, it must be rejected or modified. What is key in the description of the scientific method just given is the predictive power (the ability to get more out of the theory than you put in) of the hypothesis or theory, as tested by experiment. It is often said in science that theories can never be proved, only disproved. There is always the possibility that a new observation or a new experiment will conflict with a long-standing theory (Frank L. H. Wolfs, University of Rochester).

See also: → scientific; → method.