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Asked by limey5298 to Helen, Jenni, Mark, Martin, Stu on 13 Jun 2011.
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Mark Burnley answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Great question! One answer is that we are always trying to disprove our own theories, as well as everbody elses! That said, it is actually very hard to disprove a theory, because first you have to make sure that all your measurements are correct and that there isn’t something you have overlooked that can explain your results. If it turns out that you have done everything right, you haven’t overlooked anything AND your results disagree with the theory, you then have the right to say “these results are not consistent with the theory that…” Then, if other scientists can repeat your experiments and find the same results, the theory is likely to be considered disproved. This whole process can take 10 years or more to happen!
Regarding whether anybody has disproved my theories, I’m a bit young to have theories I’ve developed myself 🙂
Having said that, disproving theories (or trying to) is the key to science and it is really exciting when you get a result that a theory doesn’t predict. I’ll give you an example: when I was doing my PhD, everybody assumed that warm-up exercise made the increase in oxygen use during exercise faster. My first study showed that this wasn’t true: instead, the body required more oxygen after warm-up and it just looked like it was increasing faster. Quite a few people were upset about that (because they had thought it really was increasing faster), but after they went back to the lab and repeated our experiment, they found that we were right so it was all OK again!
(That last bit isn’t quite true; there are still some people upset by it, but we can’t please everyone!)
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Jenni Tilley answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Like Mark, I’m not old enough to have put forward theories that can be disproved!
That said, scientists are always testing their theories – making predictions and then doing experiments to see if their data fit the theory – so I’ve probably disproved some of my own theories over the past few years. For example, when I was doing some work at University of Sydney a few years ago, we had theory that proteins stick to plastic because of some particular chemcial groups. however, when I did some experiemtns, we found that thoe chemical groups actually *decreased* the amount of protein on the plastic, completely disproving the theory. It was very satisfying! You can see an article I wrote about it April’s edition of Biological Sciences Review here (http://www.philipallan.co.uk/biologicalreview/index.htm)
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Helen O'Connor answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Because professional athletes are such a relatively small part of the “normal population” (you and me) alot of the research I do is interviews with athletes to find out how much they are like the rest of us, and in what ways they are different.
Like Mark and Jenni, I am not at the stage of my career where my research is enough to create new theories from. I am mostly still doing research that tests other people’s theories.
I read something recently that described how some researchers are “builders” and others are “brick-makers”. What this means is that only a few top scientists “build” theories (for instance, in psychology there is Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory of how people learn). Then people like me do small research studies which can help us understand just a *little* bit more about that theory. So, right now, my research is just one or two bricks…but one day I would love to be able to build my own theory
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