Brain BREAK! presents: The Scientific Method.
I have to preface this by saying that yes, this really happened to me, and yes, I really performed this experiment at home, and yes, I am a huge dork. So let’s talk about six stages of the Scientific Method, also known as “how we figure stuff out.” The steps are called different things, so I will use a few different names. I thought this would be more insightful than the usual “echinacea tea” spiel that many textbooks use, which just kind of throws things at you.
- Observation
I made iced tea with probiotic tea and lemon juice and poured myself a cup. Then I added fiber powder to the cup and accidentally left it out for an hour. A thick jelly was at the bottom.
In this first stage, I’ve witnessed something weird that I don’t completely understand. I start asking myself some things. Mostly, what the *$&%^?
- Problem or Question
What caused this thick jelly to form? Which ingredients or conditions might form it?
Maybe the probiotic tea was activated and the bacteria started eating the fiber, which broke it down to make it gooey. Maybe the fiber just forms a jelly by itself. Maybe the acidity of the lemon causes a chemical change that firms up the fiber somehow. Maybe it was just the temperature that day. Ultimately: How do I avoid mixing such a gross beverage in the future?
- Hypothesis
Here’s what I settled on. “The combination of probiotic tea and fiber powder causes a thick jelly to form.”
I have to be able to ask this as a question: does the combination of probiotic tea and fiber powder cause a thick jelly to form? And I would like to answer it “yes” or “no” as simply as possible. I could focus on the lemon juice in my hypothesis, but I picked the tea because it seemed more interesting. On another note, I could (and should) make the hypothesis more specific. But more reflection on that in Step 6.
- Experiment
I set up three identical cups, each with an identical amount of water and an identical amount of fiber powder. I stirred them for the same amount of time. Then I needed to designate which was a control, and which variable(s) I would test in the others.
- Cup A was the control. It had water and fiber, so I could see what the fiber did by itself.
- Cup B represented one variable. It contained water, fiber, and the probiotic tea. This tests my hypothesis specifically.
- Cup C represented another possible variable from my observation. I mixed water, fiber, and lemon juice to see if there was perhaps a difference between that and the tea.
I let the cups sit for an hour, then had some chopsticks and spoons (poking implements) ready so I could figure out…
- Results and Conclusion
Cup A had some jelly on the bottom. Cup B also had some jelly on the bottom, not too different from Cup A. Cup C, with the lemon juice, seemed to have a thicker jelly at the bottom and a weirder film on the top.
I can conclude that fiber powder can form a jelly at the bottom of a cup by itself if left alone. Probiotic tea didn’t seem to make any difference. But lemon juice MAY be correlated with a thicker jelly.
With my ego bruised, I have to admit that my hypothesis was not proven right. Hey, this is science. I have to set my ego aside. From here I can think about it some more and come up with…
- New hypothesis (the next generation!)
Before I go skipping around trying to market fiber-lemon jam, I have to ask myself some questions. Can I recreate this test and get the same results? Did I possibly make a mistake? Do I need a friend to look at my experiment and say, “No, you did this wrong”?
Believe it or not, I performed a quick re-test before this post to make sure the internet wasn’t going to yell at me, and while the lemon juice mixture still seemed thicker than the control, it wasn’t by much. I was still relying on poking goop with chopsticks. What if I could find a way to reliably compare the density or weight of the jelly? Maybe I could measure the thickness with a ruler. Maybe I could use a bowl, or a plate, instead of a cup. I could try to separate the liquid from the jelly and weigh the jelly. You see how this can go on!
It’s also worth mentioning that, right now, I can’t know why the cup with lemon juice had thicker jelly. Was it the pH? Was it the citric acid? Was it because the lemon juice was kept in the refrigerator and made the fiber drink colder? I can’t know without more experiments using more variables.
Maybe a new hypothesis would be: “Adding 10 mL of lemon juice to 150 mL of [brand] fiber drink increases the density of the jelly-like substance at the bottom of a container compared to 150 mL of plain [brand] fiber drink.” This is way more detailed than my first hypothesis, and allows me to answer the “yes” and “no” better.
Wrapping up: we perform experiments all the time. What kind of carpet cleaner works best on dog pee? Which windows in my apartment should I open to make it cooler at night? Is it faster to bike or bus to school? What makes me break out in hives in the springtime? Looking at the scientific method, we can come to appreciate how critically a person must think, and how much planning and information is needed to give us the closest thing to the facts. And we can always hone in on those facts, and maybe “break” them! The most important thing is that you keep investigating.
Science is so cool and important, and everyone should appreciate and respect that. I gotta say, this whole “what is this gross stuff at the bottom of my cup” fiasco was a real eye-opener. I ended up reading about enzymes that certain bacteria use to feed on fiber, what by-products of fiber can be found in different environments, there are different types of fiber that do different things in the body, and I really need to take more water breaks when I’m playing Minecraft.
Two last notes. Remember not to confuse the words “hypothesis” and “theory” – they are completely different things. (Nothing is ever “just a theory!” Stop saying that!) And correlation doesn’t equal causation.
I may be irregular, but that drink was IRREGULAR.
-CNx