A seemingly simple task: Design a Scientific study/research project (ignore the significantly important factor of getting the funding, which will be a different thread topic). Assume that a reasonable amount of money is available; you are doing this project alone but with advice and input from colleagues, some money is available for a few assistants and technicians. Links below for some basics.


General:
https://explorable.com/research-designs

Medicine Based Studies:
http://www.cebm.net/study-designs/

Cognitive Psychology:

http://cognitivepsychology.wikidot.c...search-methods




You should note a few things before embarking on so arduous a task. First and foremost, you have to actually know a great deal about the subject matter you wish to study/research. Anecdote: when in grad school I frequently discussed research efforts with fellow students and one remarked that his advisor told him that he needed to spend “at least a few months in the library reading up on his subject before coming up with his thesis project”.

Some general advice that may not be reflected in the above links learned from experience:

Precisely circumscribe the limits of the study. (Sometimes the lack of adequate funding forces you into this, which is useful, but always in hindsight).

Persistent convolutions within the study/research path is normal. Numerous changes and deviations in the basic premises and hypothesis and methods should be understood to occur.

Understand that numerous roadblocks, from administrative to the practical will unendingly crop up (e.g. we have no laboratory space that weekend, that equipment is unavailable at this institution, or that instrument is taken for the next few months, or do have the means of dealing with the potential hazardous waste generated, etc.)

You will need some expense nerd Mathematics professor to generate and check all your equations and some statistical expert to “massage your data” (a too common expression that leads to numerous problems in itself).

You will need to produce two abstracts and presentations about the effort for scientific conferences and one paper for a peer-reviewed journal. If lucky you may get a small article/letter in Nature or Science.

There are about 105 more little tidbits I could add but I must circumscribe the limits of this OP.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Suggested topics to design a study/research project from (or pick one out of your ass):

Cord (rounded) laces for footwear last longer and stay tied better (tighter and duration) than flat (non-rounded) laces for a variety of lace material.

Adding an aspirin to the bottom of the hole when transplanting young tomato sprouts makes them grow better and survive the “shock” of transplanting and produce better tomatoes. (Don’t laugh, I was just told this neat trick by a master gardener).

Women with large breasts have more enjoyable orgasms than women with small breasts*.

Drug X produces a measurable and statistically significant better reduction in back pain than Drug Y. Drug Y being previously and statistically proven no better than the placebo effect, according to two independent published studies.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I, of course, really don’t expect anyone to do this. The OP is just to outline and help illustrate how quite literally tortuous a route it is to fully understand, formulate, quantify and then execute a research study**- Even a very simple one with supposed simple parameters. So the next time you read about, “according to this study published in X, you should be drinking two gallons of wine a day for the health benefits” you will understand the gritty nature of the research. This also means that, most likely, you personally do not have the expertise to give an accurate or useful critique on the research. Stated bluntly: Shut the **** Up about stuff you have no knowledge of or expertise in. Politely the point being to be circumspect about comments and subject matter outside of your knowledge base. This is aside from exercising poor judgment in commenting on a scientific study reported in the main stream media - Because the majority of Journalists have no more intelligence and critical thinking skills than a newt (another research project?).



*No doubt BTM has already conducted some research in this area.

** And without going into the added difficulties of research between soft sciences and hard sciences.

Don't forget getting peer reviewed by a combination of morons and people on tilt because you just obsoleted their work.

So we live in the tyranny of the experts, then? We blindly swallow what they produce? Seems...unhealthy, not to mention a good way to be dead wrong.

I contend that much scientific research is no better at getting at truth than throwing darts at a truth wheel. In fact, some of it less likely to be true than a randomly chosen opinion. There are reasons for this, which I won't get into, because no one here is as much of an expert on epistemology as me, so the discussion would be pointless.

Earn enough money to pay myself to do research.

The bolded part is utter nonsense. The fact we communicate over the internet proves otherwise, or that men made it to the moon to play golf. Only two examples, there are oodles more.

And no, you misinterpret what I said and the intent. Most rational/ scientific minded folks do not live under a tyranny - in fact the opposite. Most scientific knowledge is tenable being theories (in the scientific sense). And Math folks have absolute knowledge that can't be bucked with any amount of money. That unlearned and ignorant folk bleat about things they know nothing about is ubiquitous - again social media and the internet proves that in spades. That the bleating continues is to be expected and welcomed - how to respond (or not to respond) to the bleats is what is interesting to discuss.

That a reasonable agreement can be reached on the substantial workings of the universe, including life, has been proved again and again. That 2+2 =4 is more useful than 2+2 =5 is not an unreasonable assumption. That there are substantial aspects still unknown is a given. That some aspects will never be known is also a given. That some people's opinions are ignorant and silly and not worth reading is also a given. That anyone can spew nonsense about willy-nilly in forums is also a given and welcome. Freedom of expression is expansive as can be in SMP.

That a great number of people on the planet should shoot themselves is also an open question but one that should be discussed seriously and with lots of research conducted to see if humanity improves or not.

I'll buy you the Beer. That should save you a little.

Proves Zeno's point rather nicely.

Zeno is proving his own point rather nicely by holding an opinion of science at odds with the science.
The bolded is inarguably correct and I'm surprised you disagree. Science is a procedure, like shoelace tying or satisfying a woman. It can be done properly or poorly, and most do it poorly.

Also, I note that both of your examples are from the hardest of hard sciences, and something I chose to study. You have no quibble from me that the scientific method applied in the realm of physics is a wonderful thing for getting at truth. It has no equal. Even there, expert opinion was very wrong for decades, centuries.

Anyway. Here's why I'm inarguably correct. From reason.com, those experts on reason - to which us lowly non reason-experts should defer:
Most scientific findings are wrong or nonsense:
This is the state of science. It is a sad and sick and expensive joke, made even more absurd by the religious fervor with which many hold its output/pronouncements. I won't even start on its bastardization in the soft "sciences".

I love science. But the scientific method applied to analysing the fruits of science leads up to conclude that much scientific research is no better at getting at truth than throwing darts at a truth wheel. Which is where we started.

Anyway. I like this thread and don't want to take it on a tangent. But I won't have the good name of non-experts smeared.

Precisely! And then demolish the peer morons on tilt lol. Then demolish money culture itself!

In fact science is the most easy to adapt to the truth area of human activity. Politics is in fact an endless lie (or plotics as i call it lol and science gets ugly only due to insecurity and politics by the way so F OFF politics everywhere). Forget the bs in academia going on often but not always or everywhere. All it takes is a new proper way to describe something that actually predicts or explains a real phenomenon in a way that is reproducible and verifiable and you have all the publishing you want indefinitely. Especially today if they do not let you publish you can create a website and publish it , post youtube lecture videos, write a book or whatever. Who can stop you? The only thing stopping you is the difficulty of it all. But their messed up system in place will be impossible to stop you from destroying the house of cards if you can deliver. So deliver or die trying.

Considering that you are the wrong side of this debate, this is cutely ironic.

I knew you'd agree, Masque.

This could be done with a true experiment, but it would be expensive and almost impossible to have participants do what you want them to do in order to control for all the external variables. So a causal-comparative design would be most likely to be funded.

Easy to do a true experiment here while controlling for all other variables. But you will only be able to measure which tomatoes are "better" with subjective ratings. Size can be measured as well. The "shock" would be difficult to measure, although i'd ask a biologist if this has any operational definition that we could use.

You cannot do a true experiment when you cannot randomly assign participants. Quasi-experimental, with loss of internal validity.

You cannot ever prove the null. You can only reject the null, or fail to reject the null.

So, in this case, you should ignore the prior claims and conduct an experiment to test the alternative hypothesis by comparing Drug X to a placebo directly. For ****s and giggles, you can also add in Drug Y just to see if you can replicate the previous findings. This can be done with a true experiment, but you have issues with self-reports. Internal validity suffers, but might produce some useful data. The biggest problem here is that the agency paying for this is almost certainly fishing.


Yes, it is difficult for most people. Many of my colleagues have failed to get tenure because they can't do this. That's one reason why you see so many poorly designed studies and even outright fraud.

Here is a research project you can do on your own to help finance other projects lol.

Prove that stock market prices exhibit memory patterns unlike the theory that is pricing derivatives (or develop streaks that are different than 50-50 or 50.5-49.5 whatever near that). Investigate any statistical behavior of interest in intraday activity as well.

Here is another project. Test whether playing the following investment strategy works;

Invest in all IPO examples (the day it is offered in the middle of the day lol) that deal with technology after first passing some test of merit that we have to define properly. Then proceed to sell 90% of the position if it doubles and keep the other 10% indefinitely. Never sell in the other case. If the fundamentals are reasonable (also define that) buy double the position if it drops 50%. Then never repeat that but always sell at 2x of the avg cost price as above. Study if this method would have worked before in all major IPOs (major at the time they happened in the sense that it was known to look for them) of the past 30 years.

I could be wrong, but I would guess that the placebo effect being identified with the null hypothesis begs a lot of questions.

Mass is a measure of inertia? Is that correct?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass

(re-edit)

A very important current research project is the measurement of the mass of neutrinos.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.01579.pdf

At least you learn for sure something here that has to do with the real world and may one day connect with dark matter...besides the rejections they offer to that candidate on early cosmological arguments that are not convincing of anything.


Another important research right now is that on quark gluon plasma. It may offer insight on what happens to mass under extreme conditions such as at the creation of a black hole.


So here is a proposed research idea i offer.

Learn anything you can know from available data about neutrinos in the very early universe and calculate their reaction probability with other particles as function of their kinetic energy in the early universe (are they actually decoupling - ie not interacting very often with anything once produced- if they have very small energy like all low energy neutrinos do today ?). Then calculate over the endless generations of such reactions in the first second(s) of the big bang the amount of very very low energy thermal neutrinos you can produce that never react again with the rest (unlike the other products of these reactions that do - rendering these neutrinos a kind of rake/tax in the reactions) (defined as those with very small kinetic energies ie less than 1000km/sec speeds - they need to have that if they are now orbiting galaxies or find a way to be that low in kinetic energy).

Then study any way you can with simulations or whatever theoretical method the following problem;

1) Explain why galaxies are nearly flat and not spherical but their dark matter halo appears spherical. (reactions or lack of them explain that)

2) Predict how thermal neutrinos all over the universe would, interacting only gravitationally, form orbits around galaxies. What is the profile of the resulting matter like around the galaxy?

Can this amount explain the dark matter to observed matter ratio seen in galaxy rotation curves?

That is a legitimate plan of action needed to be investigated before actually eliminating neutrinos as the candidate. Even if it fails it delivers all kinds of education on many topics.


Here is another argument;

Can the observed asymmetry between matter and antimatter be explained by arguing that the dark matter is the other side of the problem dominated by more antimatter origin particles but because they are so hard to interact they persist as the other side (ie both imbalances appear in matter and antimatter on both observed matter and dark matter).

Basically can you explain with one move all kinds of problems? Could the asymmetry in matter antimatter relate to the dark matter ?


These are in my opinion legitimate ideas to pursue research on and learn things or find even something remarkable.


Another project may be to collect all the kinds of discrepancies from the standard model that experiments have reported past 20 years. Make a list and study all of them.


I offer these as ideas of legitimate research projects. A research if not on something extremely practical that delivers always a result (ie an experiment or observation study) should at least lead to educating yourself and understanding phenomena better. Only then you actually deserve to find something original. It will take many failures of course first.

Yes F=m*a.

It measures how difficult it is to accelerate something for example.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle

Einstein's statement of the equality of inertial and gravitational mass

A little reflection will show that the law of the equality of the inertial and gravitational mass is equivalent to the assertion that the acceleration imparted to a body by a gravitational field is independent of the nature of the body. For Newton's equation of motion in a gravitational field, written out in full, it is:

(Inertial mass) ⋅ Acceleration) = (Intensity of the gravitational field) ⋅ (Gravitational mass).

It is only when there is numerical equality between the inertial and gravitational mass that the acceleration is independent of the nature of the body.

...
The equivalence principle was properly introduced by Albert Einstein in 1907, when he observed that the acceleration of bodies towards the center of the Earth at a rate of 1g (g = 9.81 m/s2 being a standard reference of gravitational acceleration at the Earth's surface) is equivalent to the acceleration of an inertially moving body that would be observed on a rocket in free space being accelerated at a rate of 1g. Einstein stated it thus:

"

He called this the happiest thought of his life.

" I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me towards a theory of gravitation. "

In my opinion; True genius is the ability to notice ... the obvious. Most miss it and its occasional profound implications.

He did this 2 times. Once when he said time is what the clock shows (ridiculously trivially obvious and yet its all you need to know to start special relativity) . The above is how he started the general theory.



See also experimental tests of this principle. Of course equivalence principle is probably an approximation of a deeper theory that better explains both mass and geometry.

Why is this a good formula?

In a sense. Skip down to the section on relativistic mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E...gy_equivalence

It seems circular.

There's mass, force and acceleration, and they are defined in terms of each other?

The year 1907 was the beginning of the effort towards the General Relativity theory.

https://relativitycalculator.com/pdf...tsI_II_III.pdf

See also my past edited posts.

(Inertial mass) ⋅ (Acceleration) = (Intensity of the gravitational field) ⋅ (Gravitational mass).

Different masses. One is in terms of the response to force ie the acceleration that a certain force delivers and the other is the gravitational mass that is a source and receptor of gravitational attraction.

"In the theory of general relativity, the equivalence principle is any of several related concepts dealing with the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, and to Albert Einstein's observation that the gravitational "force" as experienced locally while standing on a massive body (such as the Earth) is the same as the pseudo-force experienced by an observer in a non-inertial (accelerated) frame of reference."


The force can be what a string obeying Hook's law (F=k*x) shows (ie the x reading in a spring scale lol). So the idea is that the same force that accelerates a mass with acceleration g is the same force (weight) that mass feels due to the attraction from earth in a field the earth produces where the field strength is also g (eg both 9.8 m/sec^2).


Imagine you have a spring in your desk and measuring with it the weight of a bag of say rice.

Now imagine the same bag or rice in a rocket that is accelerating with acceleration g and the spring will show the same force reading. Ie it feels as if you are under the influence of gravity inside that ship. Locally you cant tell the difference. (well almost... :-) )

You could use the spring and its reading and the acceleration or field strength (field intensity) as a way to see the mass both as inertial mass (how it reacts to acceleration) and gravitational mass (how it reacts to gravitational interaction with eg earth where g is the same as the acceleration above).

I perform highly reproduced studies of the effect of whisky on gravity. Always make room for hard science.

-Pairtheboard

Don't be mistaken. From the sounds of this, you're not advocating healthy or constructive skepticism. Rather, you're promoting mistrust.

A romantic? Want to go back to pre-enlightenment?

And..what do you know of epistemology aside from your buddy Russell and his stone cold calculated approach to a non-calculating matter (knowledge by acquaintance/description, universals/particulars and all that jazz)?

The heart of science is profound mistrust of any claimed results or expert truths.

My last sentence is mocking Zeno's absurd statement here:
Most expert published research is "cool story bro" and less reliable than what the drunkard down the pub tells you. The majority of published research is wrong (and most of the wrong research is peer reviewed - which means the peers don't know jack **** either). See my article above. Yet Zeno is rudely suggesting we live in a tyranny of this expertise. He has a religion. a tribe, not a scientific view of science and its outputs. He's taking an anti scientific view of scientific output.