Science Meets Real Life

Science Meets Real Life

PART I: SCIENTIFIC METHOD

Scenario 1: You arrive home late at night. You walk up to the front door, unlock it, and reach in to turn on the light switch located just inside the front door. The light does not come on! Now what?

Observation

First of all, I would build towards the knowing of the fact that I have met all the financial obligations regarding electricity, after that my next step would be to determine what are the reasons behind the light not coming on even after I flipped the switch. Following are the questions which would rise in my mind;

Did a circuit breaker trip?

Is there an issue with the wiring?

Is there a power outage in the whole neighborhood?

Once after knowing that there is not a power outage in the neighborhood, next I would determine if all the lights in the house are working, before I decide what the measures are required to devise a possible strategy for finding a solution to the problem.

Identifying the pattern

Now, this is the most critical stage, in which I will gather all the possible information before I can formulate a hypothesis. At this stage, my first step would be to classify whether there are any patterns or irregularities due to which the light did not turned on such as;

Does the pattern involve only one isolated area or room of the house?

See if any other device worked at the time when I plugged in the power outlet located near the light switch?

Theory

In this step, I would create a knowing regarding the issues such as this one, which are usually a result of a tripped circuit breaker, my inquiry will now be centered on this theory, and on the other hand there are also some cases in which the issue is not with the circuit breaker, but instead there is a issue with the wiring switch, however, I haven't had a problem like this in the past. Some of the questions, which would support my theory, could be:

Is there a device that is plugged in and running in that area?

Is this hypothesis one of the reasons behind the incident?

Prediction

Now, I will consider the past observation regarding a similar accident, it is most likely that the circuit breaker tripped as a result of circuitry overload, because usually when a light blows out it is due to an overload on the circuit. Now, when I examine all the electronic devices which are plugged in all the power outlets, and then compare them to other locations of my house, my conclusion would be that there is too much load on the circuit to handle, which led me towards the prediction of the root cause of the problem.

Testing

After learning about the problem, which is the tripping of the circuit breaker? Now, I would perform a simple test for making sure that all the other electronic devices, which running in the house are not running on the ...