بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Assalamu Alailkum,
One day I was walking in the science building at school and I passed a research lab labeled: photochemistry and catalysis.
(I love how it is the photochemistry lab and the lights are almost never on.)
I was thinking about experiments that must be done in that lab. It must involve atomic behavior in the presence of light (photochemistry–>photo=light). So when results are taken by whatever was done with light and compounds, the conclusions must be made with assumptions about the known behavior of light. So in my mind, what would you make your conclusions based off of? Light as a particle or light as a wave? Looking at the results from either point of view can affect what conclusions you want to make.
Naturally, I had to ask a professor. He said something that blew my mind: the experiment being done decides how you’ll look at light or other subjective definitions of things. So if you did a diffraction experiment (basically shining light through slits of paper) you would look at the change of wave behavior and not look at light with mass. But if you did a photoelectric effect experiment (shining light on a metal to get it ‘excited’), then you would have to see light with mass in order for photons to be absorbed by metal.
(So what if you shine light through a slit of paper at a piece of metal?)
Anyway, the point to think about is that how you write a procedure and purpose of an experiment is just as important as carrying it out. What you are looking for affects how you look at your method of proving/disproving it and what you are going to use. Somethings might be objective like the distance between two nuclei in a bond of a compound (NaCl) is the same no matter of those compounds you have (1, 2, or 1000 NaCl’s). But where electrons are exactly between the two nuclei can get a little fudgy.
So the experimenter is just as important as the experiment. If the experimenter is looking for something, that perspective affects the reaction too. You don’t read that in your lab book!
Very interesting.
I had never really thought about how changing the definition of light could affect conclusions from results. There is always a focus on procedure and being careful of errors, but the premise of the experiment or assumptions of different quantities are not ever discussed seriously. Or at least that is how I felt in some of my science classes.
Interesting post. Something to think about.
I wonder how science journals would look like if they wrote all possible conclusions of their experiments if they changed the operant definition of light or something else that can be looked at from multiple perspectives.
Good article, chemistry786.