Thursday, August 23, 2018

Finding The Right Pilot Study Equipment

By Daniel Peterson


By pretty much every objective measure, the world used to be empty. But it was not empty. There was plenty of nature around it. Were the world truly empty, then humankind would not have survived even a single generation. But because that nature was there, humanity got to wander around in it without any kind of permanent home. In fact, this nomadic lifestyle was exactly how humanity loved for upwards of ninety percent of its time in the world. Eventually though, it settled down. Instead of hunting and gathering to survive, it cultivated resources to thrive. Now, they learned through trial and error. But that was early humanity. Nowadays, modern humans have a little bit more trial in order to avoid the error, and they do it with pilot study equipment.

A pilot study is very similar to an experiment. Except that its purpose is not find some grand scientific conclusion or confirm some theory. No, its purpose is to work out the kinks in the system. In effect, it is a dress rehearsal for the real thing.

The purpose of such an experiment is fairly simple. Whereas most experiments seek to unravel some grand, hitherto undiscovered truth about the universe, a pilot experiment just wants to work out kinks before they go about attempting to discover that grant, hitherto undiscovered truth regarding the universe. In short, it is a rehearsal.

A concept, science is not completely unified. In fact, there are many different branches to it. It splits of into the social sciences, which generally deal with people, and the natural sciences, which deals with the world around them. Because of the schism, there really is not concrete guidelines as to what sort of equipment should be used. For sure, there will computers and such, because data has to be recorded somewhere. But there will also be equipment used in one discipline that is going to be fairly useless in another.

The most important factor will be the scientists, the people carrying out the experiment. They are the ones who are going to observe and then record those observations. It is vital that they then be objective. The last thing the world needs are experiments being tainted with confirmation bias.

A lot of basic equipment should not be all that hard to find. Anyone can walk into a big box store and buy a bunch of laptops and pens and pads of paper. But certain items like high powered telescopes capable of seeing light years away may prove to be much harder to come by than an average microscope.

During a pilot experiment, the things that are done are fairly similar to what is done during the actual experimentation. Just smaller. They record information, present their results and then build on those results as per the scientific method.

They are needed for one simple reason. A lot of time and money goes into research. Sometimes, the methods which a team will come up with will simply not be feasible. So they need to practice first.

Trial and error. That has been the way of people for centuries. That is unlikely to change now. After all, one must crawl before they can walk.




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