And you should

We all do science, at a basic level. To test if it’s raining, you go outside your house and see if water droplets are falling on you. To test if the oven is on, you open it and see if you feel heat.

There are lots of facts about reality which we might like to know. There are deep, fundamental ones like “How did life on Earth form?”.  There are shallow ones like “Is it currently raining outside my house?”. Science is how you answer these kinds of questions. The core of science is experiments, and you can just do experiments.  All you need is to make an observation that depends on the answer to your question.

To answer the biggest scientific questions in the world today, you need big experiments – the kind that use giant telescopes or particle colliders or a fancy lab. But you don’t need those things to start doing science – it is surprisingly easy to find really cool results without much equipment or formal training. The trick is that not every scientific question is that big and that hard to answer.  You can start by just testing something that seems kinda weird.  If you just like finding stuff out, here’s what you can do with experiments:

—

First, we have by no means answered all the easy questions that you can test for yourself. There are plenty of online science creators that keep coming up with new things to test that don’t require special equipment. Steve Mould’s chain fountain is a great example of this. While trying to set up a demonstration for a live science show, Mould noticed that a chain of metal beads flowing over the edge of a jar starts to rise above the jar’s edge. So he made a short video showcasing this confusing phenomenon, which turned into a longer series as he and others kept trying new variations on the experiment to uncover the root cause.

How do people like Mould find experiments like these? There’s a saying that new scientific discoveries are heralded not by “Eureka!” but by “That’s funny…”. My guess is that Steve Mould has trained his ability to notice when something is weird, especially if it’s weird and in a normal situation, so he was ready when he found something that hadn’t been explained before.

You can practice this yourself.  Next time you do some part of your usual routine, like brushing your teeth or commuting to work, pay attention to all the details that you don’t usually notice.  Why are the pipes under the sink shaped like that?  How are the roads laid out compared to the landscape?  Think about different possible answers, and how you might distinguish between them – ideally, before you look it up.  If you find an answer you don’t understand or that you think might be incomplete, write it down to study more deeply.  Keep this up and you might just get an effect named after you, too.

—

Second, you can answer a deep, fundamental question that was hard to answer when it was first posed, but is now easy to double-check.  Professor Matt Strassler has a great series on measuring the Earth and the Solar System using experiments you can do at home. I’ve done a few myself because I’m the kind of nerd who thinks measuring pixels on photos from my telescope is a fun way to spend a Friday night. You might be too, if you give it a shot.

Thanks to modern technology, plenty of other groundbreaking experiments of centuries past have entered the realm of middle school science fairs. Electrolysis comes to mind, as do microscopes. The very first video on my YouTube channel involved making a microscope by rearranging the optics on a cheap webcam. Reading about van Leeuwenhoek and watching videos of tardigrades is cool and all. But it’s a whole other experience seeing microbes wriggling around in the field of a microscope you Frankensteined from a $20 webcam. You can re-enact a little scientific revolution in your own home – it’ll definitely teach you a lot about the scientific method, and the world we live in.

—

Finally, you can do experiments on questions that matter to you or people you know, but not necessarily the wider world. Try and find what ingredients make your favorite family recipe shine like it does. Follow that brook through your neighborhood and see what wildlife lives along its banks. Run a bear fat taste test, even if it means a lot more to people who read LessWrong than to everyone else reading your blog. Professors around the world aren’t going to spend time researching your personal questions, but that’s ok. You can run the experiments yourself.

Science is a tool for understanding the universe, and a weird falling chain or a homemade potato cannon or your hair care routine is just as much a part of the universe as Mars rovers or Microbes or the Marianas Trench. So run experiments, test your hypotheses, and improve your ideas bit by bit. It may not always be the fastest way to find an answer, but it can be the most rewarding.

Coming soon: Weird facts about the Olympics