Wikipedia 10K Redux by Reagle from Starling archive. Bugs abound!!!

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Scientific_Method

The scientific method consists in four steps.

# Observe the world
# Make a guess at some fundamental rule that governs the world
# Find some experience which result could show that your guess was wrong
# Make the experiment. 

If the experiment does not disprove your theory, you can talk about it and hopefully convince other people of its validity. If your theory is similar to an already established one except in some point and your experiment shows that reality follows your theory instead of the old one, it is likely that many people will listen to you. If they can reproduce your experiment, they will be convinced of the validity of the new theory.

Note that claims that cannot be disproved, such as "there exist something outside of the world that we cannot see nor interact with" are not scientific because they fail the third criterion. Also, note that theories determined by the scientific method are not necessarily true. We may discover later that they are in fact wrong, and replace them with a newer theory.