Scientific Method – SCIE 300 Communicating Science

Do dinosaurs go RAWR?

Chris Cook of NovusTV interviews Iain Fraser, Science Facilitator at Science World about Extreme Dinosaurs. Source: Youtube Channel (NovusTV)

Not everyone can truthfully say that they work amongst a collection of giant robotic dinosaurs. However, I actually can live up to that claim, as I work part-time as a Science Facilitator at Science World during the weekend.

The Extreme Dinosaurs exhibition currently at Science World hosts 18 species of dinosaurs in animatronic form (essentially robots that look and move in a very lifelike fashion), most of which are life-sized. All of these dinosaurs have strange characteristics that were used to help them survive during the Mesozoic Era; these range from horns, plates, and crests to even feathery down, bony tail clubs, and thick skulls.

Pachycephalosaurus skeleton on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The actual purpose of some of these adaptations is still up for debate. For example, some scientists hypothesize that Pachycephalosaurus may have butted heads like rams to show dominance while looking for mates due to their thick skulls. Others think that the skulls were too fragile for the dinosaurs to butt heads, and aimed for the side of their competitors’ bodies instead.

Even with fossil evidence, there are still many adaptations that paleontologists have not been able to come to a consensus as to what their purposes were. There are some characteristics that can’t be verified from the fossil record, like the colour of dinosaurs and the sounds that they make. These still remain a mystery, and the best that scientists can do is to make an educated guess.

With many new species of dinosaurs being discovered within the past few years, the scientific method of making and testing hypotheses is alive and well in the field of paleontology.

It’s Faster than a Speeding Bullet, but is it Faster than the Speed of Light?

He was the man that explained the world and the universe around us. He was the one who provided us with the fundamental laws of physics that helped us make immeasurable strides in science and technology. He was the scientist who proposed that nothing in the universe could travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. But would it be possible that one century later, Albert Einstein’s fundamental laws would be disproved?

E = mc² is the equation describing the conservation of mass and energy, where energy (E) is equal to the mass of an object (m) multiplied by the speed of light (c) in a vacuum. Einstein proposed that the speed of light was an unbreakable barrier: no object could travel faster than 299 792 km/s. But in September 2011 at the Gran Sasso research facility outside of Rome, scientists recorded neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light.

This discovery began as an experiment timing 16 000 neutrinos as they travelled from CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland) to the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA): a 1300 metric tonne particle detector located 1400m underground at Gran Sasso, Italy. Scientists recorded the speed of light travelling from CERN to OPERA and compared it to the travelling time of neutrinos. Surprisingly, the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds faster than their counterparts. That is more than a lifetime in particle physics! It seems Einstein’s unbreakable barrier is in fact breakable – with the help of a neutrino.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFzM16w9UOM&w=560&h=315]

How has the scientific community reacted to this turn of events?

Although this is a monumental development, it is hard to believe that a majority of the scientific community will accept these results until they can be reproduced several times over with the same accuracy. After all, the fundamental laws of physics have withheld the test of time for a century! To this end, the experimental design and entire research project have been up for scrutiny by world experts and CERN scientists have specifically asked American and Japanese researchers to validate their results. This method of peer review is indispensible in the scientific process and it should be noted that each discovery (regardless of the magnitude or implications of the results) undergoes the same procedure in any scientific field.

Doesn’t it feel good knowing that the scientific method and publication processes we’ve learned during our undergraduate degrees correspond to the orderliness and structure of science used in the broader scientific community?

Further Reading: Particles Break Light Speed Limit