Bells' disagrees with MR over a view that I'm inclined to tentatively agree with MR about, namely "The Scientific Method" being something of a myth. (No, I'm not "mocking" 'The Scientific Method', I'm expressing intellectual doubts about it. There's a difference.)
Do you think scientists just stumble along into scientific discoveries? Tip toeing through the tulips until they just stumble upon something and voila!
Scientists do all kinds of things, they conduct observations and perform surveys to learn what physical reality consists of, they conduct all manner of physical experiments to try to determine more precisely how it behaves, they perform dissections of biological specimens, they perform statistical analyses, they derive this bit of mathematics from that bit, and yes, they often put their scientific intuition and imagination to work to form new hypothetical speculations.
Scientists follow a certain methodology
I'd prefer to say that scientists have a whole tool-kit of methods, that they employ as situations arise. Often scientific originality consists of an unexpected choice of methods and using established methods in new and creative ways. Occasionally scientists will invent entirely new methods to address scientific problems that they are faced with.
If one watches what scientists spend their time doing, it's quickly apparent that they aren't all doing the same things in the same order. There's no single algorithm, no single flow-chart or methodological procedure, to which the practice of science invariably conforms.
That's not to say that scientists employ their methods randomly. The method chosen needs to be relevant to the problem at hand, it has to have a reasonable likelihood of contributing to the resolution of that problem, it needs to be logically and epistemologically justifiable as well as being justifiable in purely scientific terms, and it needs to provide results that are objective (true about the natural world itself) and not just subjective (imaginary, true about the beliefs of the individual talking and not about the world that he/she is ostensibly talking about). Establishing that last is seemingly where the testing and verification steps become so important.
from the conception of an idea or observation, they follow steps to get to an outcome.
A theoretical physicist deriving a string of mathematical symbols from other strings, in hopes of achieving the outcome of conceptually unifying two areas of physics, is doing something very different than a desert ecologist turning over rocks in hopes of achieving the outcome of learning what kind of small organisms are sheltering in the moist soil under them in the hot dry Australian afternoon.
That is what is known as the "scientific method".
The phrase "The Scientific Method" is often used in such a way as to suggest to the public that 'science' is distinguished from, superior to and more authoritative than other human activities due to its possessing some magic algorithm. Supposedly it's the discovery of this 'method' that explains the scientific revolution in the 17th century and the extraordinary success of the natural sciences since then. It's the use of this 'method' that supposedly demarcates real science from religion, pseudoscience and superstition. During the 18th century, it was believed that if the scientific lightening exemplified by the success of Newtonian mechanics could just be trapped in a methodological bottle and applied to social problems, then obscurantism could be swept away and the world could be transformed into a paradise. In the 19th century new (and largely unsuccessful) "social sciences" were invented so as to realize that program.
Basically, I'm skeptical about most of that.
To the extent that an overarching epistemological structure exists above all of science, it seems to me to largely be trial-and-error combined with steps to ensure objectivity. There's nothing really unique to science in any of that. We see the same things in prehistoric humans learning to salt meat and in the craft-tradition practices of ancient potters, textile weavers and blacksmiths.
So what did happen in the 17th century to create what was interpreted (with considerable justification) as a scientific revolution? That's a much harder and more subtle problem and it's still an open question in the history of science. I'm inclined to think that first off, it was the use of mathematics to address physical problems in new and fruitful ways. But perhaps most importantly, it was just luck. The scientific revolution jumped out of the gate because mathematics were applied to classes of physical problems where the underlying principles were simple enough that they could be discovered and understood with the means at hand. It was assumed (largely for theological reasons) that nature behaved according to "laws". And examining the motions of the planets or geometrical optics, early science discovered that relatively simple mathematical regularities do in fact underlie the complexity observed in nature. Chemistry and biology proved far more resistant to these early efforts, not because there aren't regularities embedded in them as well, but because their underlying principles aren't nearly as obvious or simple. Today psychology is what's still resisting this kind of understanding. And when it comes to history, there don't seem to me to be any simple underlying "laws" governing how it unfolds at all.
