Cause and Effect
Oh, cause and effect. How we love you in the science world. Cause and effect is the backbone of the scientific method; it drives everything from our hypotheses to our conclusions in an experiment. The job of the scientific method is to tell us if a cause produces an observed effect.
For example, let's say we want to find out if peanut butter will cure athlete's foot (we're doing the experiment for a friend, we swear). We're hypothesizing that the peanut butter will kill the athlete's foot fungus and the symptoms will disappear. Did you catch the cause and effect there? In case you were so grossed out you missed it, the cause would be the peanut butter, the effect would be no athlete's foot symptoms.
Okay, so now that we've given our hypothesis the cause and effect treatment, we need to perform our experiment and see if our proposed cause and effect is an actual cause and effect. Any volunteers? Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?.
All right, we'll just make up some hypothetical results. Let's say after two weeks of applying peanut butter to the, er, affected area, we observe that there is no change in the symptoms, but the area is quite moisturized and smells like a Nutter Butter. We can conclude that peanut butter did not cause the athlete's foot symptoms to disappear, but may have caused the foot odor to die down.
We do have to be careful about identifying something as a cause of something else. Sometimes what seems like a cause is actually a correlation. A correlation just means there's some kind of relationship between two variables. No, they're not asking each other to prom. We usually describe this relationship as positive, negative, or no relationship at all. Okay, so maybe this does describe prom.
Anyhoo, back to correlations. Let's say Mama Shmoop bakes us a batch of her famous snickerdoodles every week. Every time she brings them over, it rains. We could say there is a positive correlation between rain and snickerdoodles. What we can't say is that the snickerdoodles caused the rain. At least not without evidence to back it up. Unless we can get some scientific proof that Mama Shmoop's cookies are causing some major meteorological mayhem, it's just a coincidence that these delectable treats appear when the rainclouds do.
Guess what. Cause and effect isn't just important in science. We'll see this concept creeping into all sorts of different subjects, and even into our lives. What caused World War II and what were the effects? What caused us to miss curfew (and let's not talk about the effects)? It doesn't matter what field we're studying, being able to see the relationship between cause and effect is going to help us understand it like a pro.