REVELLE LECTURE | Ocean Exploration

Author | First Paragraph | Full Article | Citation

Author

Marcia McNutt | Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Moss Landing, California, USA

Presentation

What fuels scientific discovery? The experts on this subject, the philosophers of science, have recently tended to promote the value of hypothesis-driven research, in which questions suggest experiments that lead to tests of the proposed theory. Hypothesis testing is indeed a cornerstone of the scientific method. It is what we teach our students. It is how we write our proposals and how we logically present the arguments in our scientific papers.

But as I think back on some of the more interesting scientific papers that I have written, I admit that this classic application of the scientific method was mostly a farce. The hypothesis that I set out to test (as per the funded National Science Foundation proposal) was not the question I ended up answering. The paper that I ultimately wrote made it sound as though I had known all along where the project was leading, whereas in fact it was only after the data were collected that I finally was able to, in effect, "read the story that the data had to tell." The National Science Foundation (NSF) implicitly seems to understand that this experience is commonplace; in evaluating your prior accomplishments, they never ask whether you found the answer to the question you had been funded to address. All that counts is that your results are original and important.

What this experience suggests to me is that there is still so much we do not know about the oceans that often we do not even know the proper questions to ask or an unambiguous way to test what hypotheses we do have. For that reason, I am a fan of ocean exploration.

Top

Full Article

4.81 MB pdf

Top

Citation

McNutt, M. 2002. Revelle Lecture: Ocean exploration. Oceanography 15(1):112–121, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2002.42.

Top