The so called SCIENTIFIC METHOD is usually understood in all sciences because all sciences have these concepts involved: a hypothesis, research, test of the hypothesis via EXPERIMENT, analyzing the data, publishing the results of the data for peers to review, re-evaluate the hypothesis.
1) This defines much pseudo-science too, and doesn't allow for many scientific theories (particularly those in fields like particle physics and extensions of QM).
2) Hypotheses are generally intricately tied to (and originating from) the theories they seek to "test" (at least if we try to adopt something like "The Scientific Method" misconception; a better description would be that hypotheses are generated from theories and seek to test and expand the theories that they are generated from).
3) The distinction between theory and hypothesis is blurred to the point that we have theories of hypothesis testing and a large portion of research across the sciences explicitly state that they are testing aspects of particular theories already established.
4) Hypotheses are basically never re-evaluated. The textbook "Scientific Method" (i.e., something like "Formulate hypothesis, test it, and if it is repeatedly confirmed call it a theory") was an idealization of 18th and 19th century scientific experimentation, and is wholly unsuited as a description of modern scientific research. The kinds of experiments used to teach high school and even university students The Scientific Method instead teach how seemingly isolated hypothesis could be tested independent of theory by relying on upon idealizations of classical experiments divorced from context. Yet that was when science was in its infancy, and the influence of context and theoretical frameworks was minimal enough to not be appreciated. This little myth was annihilated when the entirety of physics came crashing down from an epistemological crises resulting from centuries of debate over which of two hypotheses were correct when in fact neither were and the only reason this wasn't realized earlier was because theory dictated the hypotheses. Now, the interconnectedness of experiments with various theoretical framework, theories of research design, theory-laden interpretations, etc., make the notion of re-testing hypothesis largely impossible, particularly as hypothesis testing is in many sciences merely a formal, binary statement explicitly tied to an experimental design and statistical methodology.
There is no such thing of a science that does do those things!!!
All of them (providing we include the "re-test hypotheses"). Barring that, what you've described isn't a method. And as concepts, they are all practiced outside the sciences, from pseudoscientific nonsense history. Meanwhile, the application of these concepts removes from vital methods from the scientist's toolbox, such as thought-experiments (which can't result in any data to analyze), the mathematical derivation of theories which gave us quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum field theory, most of particle physics, all of M-theory (untestable) and other incarnations of string theory (untestable), supersymmetry (untestable), the Church-Turing thesis (which motivates research in a vast swathe of fields such as computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, etc.), and so on.
If there were a BILLION steps a particular scientist had to use it would involve the same steps!
Those aren't steps, they aren't distinct, and not all of them are generally used or even ever used.
You are trying to make things subjective and case by case by doing what you are doing.
I'm actually trying to fix a disconnect I have found to exist increasingly between scientists and non-scientists that organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences and the AAAS (among others) have likewise identified.
The authors above are misusing the terminology.
Among "the authors" are basically the most influential, most important, and largest scientific societies/associations in the world.
Some one should inform them of the correct context! SCIENCE requires experimentation.
Quantum electrodynamics was derived independently of experimentation using mathematics. The most cited physics paper (EPR) written which (along with another paper by Bell in the 60s) influenced the nature of a large class of experiments first carried out in the 80s did not, itself, use any experiments. A great deal of research in neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive psychology, etc., has relied on 'hypotheses" that were formulated by Roman grammarians borrowing from ancient Greek Grammarians a few thousand years ago. There exists nearly a century of research and experimentation on the validity and soundness of the central method of hypothesis testing across a large number of sciences. Physics beyond the standard model remains largely untestable, but as most of the standard model doesn't allow for the distinguishing between the mathematical representations of systems in experiments and whatever they are experimenting on nor the results, this isn't as problematic as it would have been regarded a century ago. What was until recently the majority view of the nature of language in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, etc., and remains incredibly influential was constructed without any experiments. Information theory was derived using notions form physics without any experiments. I could go on, but the point is that although the sciences do require experimentation, this does not demarcate what is and isn't science as experiments can be conducted outside of the sciences and the incredibly important advances within the sciences can require no experiments.
THIS IS WHY SCIENCE IS SCIENCE.
Science is science because of Chem 101 students?
Humans can define words and classify things about the world without any experimentation such as numbers, bachelors, triangles, mammal, atheist, etc. All of those things can be understood without using any of our senses and does not require experiment to understand.
Interesting. I happen to know of a few labs at Harvard and at least one at MIT that devote much time and many experiments in an attempt to understand exactly what you are talking about. In fact, one of the most important questions in perhaps the largest interdisciplinary science (the cognitive sciences, which include fields ranging from philosophy and linguistics to physics and computer science) is how humans do this as such categorization is the central cognitive mechanism not just for humans but animals as well, although for animals such classification is non-linguistic. Most of machine learning and AI is devoted to trying to understand how humans "classify things about the world" using experiments in an attempt to create programs that can mimic this.
Perhaps YOU CAN use senses on them if you DESIRE but it is NOT REQUIRED.
Actually, scientists disagree over the nature of how words defined (and even what they are or if they exist), are mostly in agreement that none of these things are understood by our senses (or really understood at all by anyone thanks to distinctions such as
Ausdruck/Bedeutung,
parole/langue, intersubjectivity, etc.), and finally the definitions. In fact, "bachelor" is a classic example used by cognitive scientists who focus on language to show the problems with a non-contextual, "dictionary"-like lexicon (is the Pope a bachelor?).
All things are NOT science.
Nobody said they were.
I do not know what PLANET those scientists are from but on EARTH all sciences MUST involve the physical senses and at the end of the day that is all that matters.
First you say that "All things are NOT science" and then you state that sciences "Must involve" something all people use all the time.
The ARTS for instance can involve the physical senses but the result is not dependent on the SENSES alone.
Neither are the sciences, obviously. Assuming you agree that logic is important to the scientific endeavor, then we have an easy example of a vital tool for scientists that isn't a sense.
Judo for instance is an ART
Developed by Jigoro Kano using principles from physics and experimentation (as opposed to the much more spiritual route of O Sensei Morihei Ueshiba's Aikido, despite the common set of traditions they individually adopted and adapted to form their respective styles). Judo relied on principles of physics and years of testing, reformulation, and further experiment. It is not a science, however. Yet it conforms to your "model" of what "science" must be.
With science we MUST use physical senses
But not Judo? Or Gymnastics? What senses are used for these?
The things that are not science do not FOCUS on the senses as much.
You think gymnasts and martial artists rely less on senses than particle physicists who work with systems primarily described mathematically and to the extent they are "observed" (despite the fact that obervables here are mathematical functions) it is through highly indirect methods such as the detection of scattering from colliders or ion traps or NMR. Not only can we not see subatomic particles, but we cannot indirectly observe them without non-trivially disturbing the measurements we would like to make.
