Is there a single “scientific method”?
Rough overview of scientific method.
(Though at this level of detail, the answer to the KQ is 'no'.)
Nowadays thought of as the founder of the scientific method. Sometimes overlooked in at least popular Western histories of science produced in nineteenth-twentieth century.
Also thought of as father of optics.
Feynman is widely regarded as the greatest physicist of the second half of the twentieth century.
This has some edits out of a public talk he gave on the scientific method. Much of it aligned with Popper.
Question: Previous investigation of DNA had determined its chemical composition (the four nucleotides), the structure of each individual nucleotide, and other properties. X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA by Florence Bell in her Ph.D. thesis (1939) were similar to (although not as good as) "photo 51", but this research was interrupted by the events of World War II. DNA had been identified as the carrier of genetic information by the Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment in 1944,[41] but the mechanism of how genetic information was stored in DNA was unclear.
Hypothesis: Linus Pauling, Francis Crick and James D. Watson hypothesized that DNA had a helical structure.[42]
Prediction: If DNA had a helical structure, its X-ray diffraction pattern would be X-shaped.[43][44] This prediction was determined using the mathematics of the helix transform, which had been derived by Cochran, Crick and Vand[45] (and independently by Stokes). This prediction was a mathematical construct, completely independent from the biological problem at hand.
Experiment: Rosalind Franklin used pure DNA to perform X-ray diffraction to produce photo 51. The results showed an X-shape.
Analysis: When Watson saw the detailed diffraction pattern, he immediately recognized it as a helix.[46][47] He and Crick then produced their model, using this information along with the previously known information about DNA's composition, especially Chargaff's rules of base pairing.[48]
See sub-page.