What question can be proved wrong or right by science, but has not been done before? What kind of processes would I go through to prove this?

How is it possible to know that something is provable if it hasn’t been proven? That doesn’t make sense to me.

I just need something that can either proved wrong or right, it has some scientific basis and evidence, but nobody has really done in depth research. I was quite confused by this as well, but it’s an assignment I was given.

Impossible. Infinite regress

I highly doubt that there is something at your level of understanding that can be proved right or wrong that hasnt been experimented on yet.

There’s plenty of stuff. Off the top of my head,

• How deep are the wind/current patterns on Jupiter?

• Do particulate “chromotophores” cause the colors of Jupiter’s clouds, or is there another process?

• Does the Higgs boson exist?

Ahhh I thought it had to be something the OP could actually accomplish on their own.

It just has to be an idea and a process that I could go through to somehow prove this. I’m not going out of my way to really prove anything unless I get absolutely enthralled with the subject.

Space would definitely be the easiest way to go with this then.

If this is a science class, and they’ve been trying to teach you the scientific method, you better get another teacher. You can’t “prove” a negative. All you can do is fail to find any evidence to support a hypothesis. Just because you fail to find it, doesn’t mean that there is none.

I’m a social scientist, so I see things differently than my colleagues over in the hard sciences. In my business, you can’t really prove anything, because there is always too much unexplained variance in the relationships between various factors that may or may not be causal.

The hard science guys think they can prove things beyond any doubt. I think they can say something is pretty much always true—true enough that we’ll never see the relationship between A and B vary in the history of mankind—but there is still a non-zero likelihood that that relationship will not always hold true.

I think what you are being asked for is a research question. As it happens, most of my work has to do with helping people figure out what their research question is. I suggest you look at something—anything—that you are interested in. Or pay attention to yourself, and the next time you find yourself asking “why” this or that, you look at that and see how you could figure out the answer, and what you guess the answer is. Then you’ve got a research question.

Research questions abound. They fall around us like snowflakes in a blizzard. There are so many, that all you can do is see the surface and be blinded by it.

So, quick, without thinking…

What do you want to know right now?!?

@wundayatta I wouldnt exactly agree with the first part. I can prove for instance that pigs can not fly by giving evidence to support they have no means of doing such.

I’m thinking about picking something that is either related to genetics or space. I am interested in both. This isn’t for a science class, but just for a club that I joined on campus.

What is the speed of light through vanilla pudding?

What is the correlation between the length of a kitty’s whiskers and his or her intelligence? Or average daily nap time?

How many jelly beans can you fit in an average kangaroo pocket?

Does a vacuum cleaner work in a vacuum?

OK… I can’t actually swear that none of these have been tested already. Also, I bet if you think about it for a while you could come up with some great and original ideas that are more in your interest area.

I’m not sure how serious this assignment was, but I doubt you’re expected to solve a really important question. That’s what grad school is for!

time travel….build a time machine.

Have you considered that this task is not actually about the issue at hand, but was designed to make you think about the underlying philosophy of science?

We tend not to talk about “proving” things in science. We formulate hypotheses which can be supported by the weight of scientific evidence. But these theorumsthey can still be disproven by a single inconvenient fact which might arise sometime in the future. So the outcomes are always tentative, never “proven” in this sense. The end result is that science is always open to further scientific evidence, which might overturn models which previously were seen to account perfectly well for observed phenomenon.

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” – Albert Einstein

Karl Popper is the name that comes up in this regard. Check out the wiki article on “scientific evidence” or falsifiability

When I’m looking for a topic to write about, and nothing smacks me in the face as interesting (which isn’t often) I hit the mags. (Science Magazines) and there is a great resource of them online.

http://www.popsci.com/
http://www.nature.com/
http://www.newscientist.com/

All of these sites are searchable for subjects, so knock yourself out.

Right now, I’m rather interested in the lack of knowledge of the tectonic plates in New Zealand. For a country that has so many earthquakes every year, they have yet to map out the plates locations and their depths to better assess earthquake risks and land motion. It’s a wonderfully interesting country, geologically, but sometimes ‘interesting’ isn’t always conducive to safe living conditions for us puny humans.

There are ALL sorts of questions that are currently being asked and once we think we’ve answered one question… Like ‘The definition of a planet…’ we find a solar system that has two planets sharing the same orbit! How cool is THAT! Now, the new question is ‘How did that happen?

So, as scientists, we have to constantly redefine what we consider ‘answers’..... in the face of new evidence.

I just read an article about the use of solar sails for space travel. Reading about it’s first introduction as a theory through to the flight of IKARUS, it tells a pretty good story about how a question is first asked and then the process of answering that question through science. (Just as an example.)

You are asking for hard science to answer this question. Well, this can’t be done. You can’t use science itself to answer a meta-scientific question. You can’t use scientific method to prove or refute scientific method. Your question belongs to the realm of epistemology and philosophy of science.

“The concept of falsifiability was made popular by Karl Popper in his philosophical analysis of the scientific method. Popper concluded that a hypothesis, proposition, or theory is scientific only if it is, among other things, falsifiable.”

What does this mean? Here are two examples:

We can’t prove evolution. We can only try to refute it. If we succeed then evolution is proved wrong. As of February 25, 2011 not a single scientist on our planet has been able to refute evolution. This has not been done. So it continues to be the best theory we got to explain the tree of life.

We can’t prove Newton’s law of universal gravitation. We can only try to refute it. Einstein succeeded and he proved Newton’s law of universal gravitation to be wrong (although it’s still good enough for many real world phenomena).

@mattbrowne you’re getting all existential on the girl. Your’re confusing ‘theory’ with real facts. There are plenty of answers that science has given us. Look how we’ve standardised weights and measures by using science. Barometric pressure, temperature, study of tides and currents and their effect on weather patterns.. All real science that has been studied to better forecast the weather.

The study of chemistry has answered many questions. Actual, every-day solutions have been found using science.

The modern manufacturing method of panes of glass, for example or the food we eat every day has come about because someone asked.. ‘how long would this last on a shelf if we found a way to dry it’. That’s science. Not Nobel winning stuff, perhaps, but it’s science.

There are plenty of ‘glamorous’ science theories being worked on (LHC for example… very sexy) and there are also theories people may never agree upon in our lifetime. But when Copernicus looked up at the sky and his did his math, do you think he foresaw what we’d see with the Hubble Telescope and the questions and answers we’d be able to pose about our Universe? Heliocentrism was only a hypothesis when he was alive and that was less than 500 years ago.

‘Studying Science without studying History gives scientists ADHD.’ – me.

@cazzie – If she had said ‘I need convincing arguments behind this. No guesses’ instead of ‘I need hard science behind this. No guesses’ I would not have gone into it. But people need to realize that hard science cannot offer final answers about the validity of hard science.

I didn’t dispute the fact that science is great at explaining natural phenomena and making good predictions about future ones. Wonderful answers. Look at the tags she entered. For example evolution. Her question does go deeper. And I mentioned the fact that no one has been able to refute evolution. Our knowledge of evolution is critical in finding cures for cancer or dealing with influenza.

@mattbrowne I think she’s quite young and is still learning what ‘science’ is, so I tried to explain in my answer how we find new things all the time and have to redefine what we thought we knew. I didn’t come right out and call her ‘wrong’ for how she phrased her question. Asking science for ‘hard facts’ is a common novice mistake. Wouldn’t you agree?

She also wrote ‘hypothesis’ as one of her tags. She needs to answer this question for herself so she can see that it’s never as simple as it looks. There is very rarely black and white, even in science. One of my favourite sayings when someone asks me a question in the form of an answer… (you know the type, right?) Is… ‘I think you’ll find, it’s more complicated than that.’

But, good science comes from asking the right question first. Wouldn’t you agree?

How many times have we heard from Doctor Grads… ‘Oh, man… my guide proff doesn’t like my proposition.’.... Send them off to narrow their question down so they have a better chance at coming out of their research with an answer.

@KatetheGreat what year are you in at school? Are you looking to us to actually supply you with the question and then how to answer it?

@cazzie – I get your point. Thanks!

@KatetheGreat “I’m thinking about picking something that is either related to genetics or space.”

As @cazzie just said above, you will need to narrow your question.

This is serious. It’s not an issue of looking around for a question. It’s about being curious. I mean, what do you want to know? Why does space interest you? Why genetics? Do you have some health condition that could benefit from further study?

For example. I actually have two genetic conditions that I carry the genes for: cystic fibrosis and bipolar disorder. I would love to know if there is some way to make a better med to help me. I know they are doing genetic research, and, if I understood my psychiatrist correctly, it seems that there is a gene shared by all the mental illnesses. Wow! What if all the mental illnesses are just variations of the same thing?

And looky there! My question. Or the start of a question. My first question would be how much genetic material do the various mental illnesses share in common? Then I might go to what do these alleles do? Then I might ask, how can I change how they function?

Of course, there are an enormous amount of questions inside those questions. But that’s how science goes.

Think about what you think about when your are interested in something. Pay attention. You are asking questions all the time. What about this? How does that? When does this happen? Who does it? All questions are susceptible to the scientific method. But they do require breaking down into as many component steps as is necessary.

Here’s another question. Cystic Fybrosis, in its full form, makes it hard for a person to clear the liquid in their own lungs. Eventually, they drown in their own body fluids. There is something about osmotic processes involved. [please don’t hold me to the specifics, this is just for example]. In bipolar disorder, sodium uptake in brain cells seems to be very important. It seems like that is an osmotic thing, too. Could they be related?

Questions arise from information. You need to know about things in order to know what you don’t know. The more you know, the better your questions. Is there something you know a lot about? It sounds like you aren’t very knowledgeable about genetics or space. But there must be something you’ve enjoyed most of your life and you know a lot about. What is that?

I know the wording of my question was a little off, I’m sorry for that. I feel as though some of you have been questioning my intelligence, so I’ve actually went on my own and figured things out. Thank you all for the comments though. I’ve decided on the ability of the human body to withstand extended years in a 0g environment.

And to Cazzie- I am actually a sophomore in college.

Welcome to Fluther, @KatetheGreat !

@mattbrowne Thanks!!!