Experiment!: Planning, Implementing and Interpreting

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You, the Discoverer

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

—Galileo Galilei

First of all, I would like to congratulate you. The reason that you are reading this book must be that you are learning about scientific method. This should open up possibilities for a variety of interesting professional tasks in the future. Scientific method can be said to be an approach for breaking a complex problem down into its essential components, investigating these components through relevant data and critical thinking, and finally solving the main problem by putting the components back together. Being familiar with scientific method makes it easier to handle complex problems, wherever we encounter them. This is of course useful in various branches of scientific research, where the method was developed, but complex problems occur in many situations. It does not harm policy makers, managers, or technical experts, for example, to be skilled critical thinkers, creative problem solvers, and to be able to draw relevant conclusions from data.

As conveyed by its title, this book is written for experimenters. Experiments are made in a wide variety of research and development tasks, to test ideas and to find out how things work. The book grew out of a need to teach research students general research skills. This means that it is mainly directed towards Ph.D. students, but it is likely also that others working with research and development will find ...