Question: do you back up your facts with an opion when you experement things

Edward Codling answered on 16 Jun 2011:

Hi howen001 – a good question!

As scientists we always have to rely on evidence (usually data from experiments) to back up any theory or explanation that we want to put forward. For example in some of our research we made some predictions about how we thought animal groups might behave – however for other scientists to believe us we had to show this prediction to be true by running some real experiments and collecting the data to show that it matched our predictions.

So scientists might have an opinion about how animals might behave for example, but we have to test this opinion by running experiments and collecting data before we can accept it as true.

One problem we often have is that the data from a particular experiment could be explained in different ways. In these cases scientists do often have different opinions and might argue with each other. However, to show that one scientist is correct and the other is wrong, they would have to go away and run more experiments again to collect more evidence to back up their point of view.