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"Science doesn't prove things, science probes things"

Gregory Bateson, Mind And Nature, A Necessary Unity

Similar to the philosophy, science is also a game to be played by the minds that consider themselves able. It just so happened that, because of their coincidental practical applications, scientific theories came to be regarded as the Truth incarnate. Seeing how many impressive changes scientific theories could bring in a short period of time, many people started worshipping science. Some even saw it as a legitimate replacement for the religion. This, unfortunately, is a sad reminder of what can happen when we allow ourselves to be carried away too much.

Invariably, people are astonished when they learn that a theory could be considered to be truly scientific only if it allows for some future piece of evidence to prove it wrong. If a theory is constructed in such a way that it is so airtight that nothing could ever break it, then it is not a scientific theory. It is as simple as that.

This is the fundamental rule of this game we call scientific research. Many people (including, believe it or not, some professional scientists!) are not aware of this fundamental postulate. Consequently, they believe that all those scientific theories are actually the infallible laws. Such views are extremely naive, to say the least.

What's This Scientific Research Game All About?

By carefully studying the work of many great scientists, we invariably come to the conclusion that science and scientists are obsessed with elegance. To put it more specifically: given a set of evidences, there usually is more than one plausible explanation regarding how such evidence functions, and how it came into being. What science does in such cases is to zero in on the most elegant of these explanations.

This is where things start to get a bit tricky. The problem revolves around the definition of elegance. The simple fact is that there really isn't any broadly accepted definition of this all-encompassing notion. It would be a gross oversimplification to claim that the elegance is nothing else but simplicity. Notice how nobody defines science as a discipline that strives to achieve the simplest explanation. But everyone agrees that science strives for providing the most elegant explanation.

The elegant explanation is powerful because it brings with it certain sense of clarity. It eliminates, as much as is possible, the background noise and minimizes the chances of any form of confusion creeping into an explanation. Such an explanation does not have to necessarily be simple, or simplistic. But it must carry with it the power of explaining more complex things by relying on the simpler principles exposed in such scientific theory.

The Two Pillars Of Science

Seeing that the most important ingredient of any scientific research endeavor, namely the elegance, is really nothing more than some intuitive, gut feel, we must discuss other, auxilliary principles of scientific research discipline which may give it a more exact aura. There are, indeed, two principles that lend an air of exactness and repeatability to this discipline:

1. Occam's Razor

This principle is borrowed from the field of philosophy of science, and is defined as:

When explaining phenomena, it is vain to multiply entities beyond necessity

William of Occam

2. Entropy

This principle is borrowed from the scientific discipline of thermodynamics. The Law of Entropy, in its broadest rendition, states that:

Given sufficient time, all systems tend to reach their least complex state.

Although this law was initially formulated (more than a hundred years ago) to describe some important aspects of the behavior of mechanical systems, it was discovered later on that it is equally applicable to other systems, no matter how complex.

The curious part of this law of entropy is how closely it is tied with the law of probability. Slightly reformulated, the law of entropy could read:

The probability for a system to be in its least organized (or least complex) state is greater than the probability for such system to be in a more organized state.

Science And Formal Systems

The Null Hypothesis

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