How much proof do you have to gather to prove that your theory/experiment is correct?

Question: How much proof do you have to gather to prove that your theory/experiment is correct?
- Keywords:
  experiments,
  proof,
  theory
Asked by sunshine246 to Del, Catherine, John, Krishna, Mo Rassul on 12 Mar 2014.
- John Foster answered on 12 Mar 2014:
  
  Hi,
  We have to provide quite a lot of proof. We have a theory that we have made based on a few little experiments, we then work out what kind of experiments we need to do to test this theory.
  
  Each experiment will be repeated at least 3 times to make sure that what we are seeing is the same each time (we usually do it a lot more times). We also try and look at the theory from lots of different sides. We use different types of experiments to see if they show the same kind of thing.
  
  If all the data points to the same conclusion, and we want to show everyone else what we have found, we send it to a journal. This is much like a scientific newspaper or magazine. Before they put it their journal, they send it off to a few other scientists. These people independently look at the work, decide if everything looks okay and they can accept or reject your work. They often ask you to try some more experiments to help with your proof!
- Catherine Mansfield answered on 12 Mar 2014:
  
  Our aim is to make a discovery good enough to be published in a scientific journal. It is very important to make sure that anything that is published in those journals is correct and so we do have to gather quite a lot of proof for our theory. In order for it to get accepted we need to have enough proof to convince the reviewers that what we are saying is correct.

Question: How much proof do you have to gather to prove that your theory/experiment is correct?

Comments