Actually yes. When I ran into troubles getting my experiments to work I went back and performed a technique that hadn’t been widely used since the 1960’s! Now its used a lot more in my old lab as it solved a lot of our problems.
In field research, we use a combination of old and new methods.
The older ones are generally only replaced when something better comes along.
At the moment I am using a lot of new technology, and trying to understand how it can fit into the research, and sometimes I find it is not as good as claimed.
Science, as a method for finding answers, is pretty good at keeping what works and getting rid of things that don’t. For a new thing to make it, it generally has to be more efficient than the current method to be taken on.
Hey redranga. Some tried and tested techniques work very well, however we have new and better modifications of these existing techniques. In my field, though, the new technology and techniques available to us is mind blowing. There are many things we can do now that could not have been done even 5 years ago. We live in a pretty exciting time when it comes to technology and technique development.
Science has always been about asking questions, proposing models, and testing those models with experiments or observations. In this sense, the old methods are the new methods. The scientific method does not change. Tools and techniques do change, and generally improve, over time. Often if we are performing a new and complicated experiment, we may not fully trust the results, so go back to a tried and true method that may not be exactly the experiment we want to perform, but we have high confidence in. It is all part of building up evidence and confidence in results. New methods and techniques are built on the previous generation, just like new ideas are grounded in the ideas that came before. Galileo -> Newton -> Einstein -> ?????? -> ??????.
Hi Redranga,
Combinations of old and new methods work pretty well. You also have to be able to recognise when you might need to use the older technique or a newer one. In organic chemistry, some people think that you have to always come up with new ways to do reactions, but that certainly isn’t the case. There are several reactions that were discovered long ago and we continue to use them because they work extremely well. You apply them to make your new chemicals, but of course you have to think all the time about which reaction conditions to use in case certain things will affect your particular system badly. If something works well then there is absolutely no need to come up with a whole new method, but if something doesn’t quite work then you do need to think about and adjust the conditions that you use. While some people seem to think we need new reaction methods all the time, some people don’t seem to understand that you can’t necessarily apply the same conditions that everyone else has been doing for years and years! So you really do have to keep thinking about what you are doing.
New instruments/instrumental techniques are being developed a lot, too, so I get to use some pretty cool machines as well, which didn’t necessarily even exist years ago. Or the technique itself has been around for a while, but newer and more powerful machines are always being developed.
Actually yes. When I ran into troubles getting my experiments to work I went back and performed a technique that hadn’t been widely used since the 1960’s! Now its used a lot more in my old lab as it solved a lot of our problems.
0
Hi redranga,
In field research, we use a combination of old and new methods.
The older ones are generally only replaced when something better comes along.
At the moment I am using a lot of new technology, and trying to understand how it can fit into the research, and sometimes I find it is not as good as claimed.
Science, as a method for finding answers, is pretty good at keeping what works and getting rid of things that don’t. For a new thing to make it, it generally has to be more efficient than the current method to be taken on.
0
Hey redranga. Some tried and tested techniques work very well, however we have new and better modifications of these existing techniques. In my field, though, the new technology and techniques available to us is mind blowing. There are many things we can do now that could not have been done even 5 years ago. We live in a pretty exciting time when it comes to technology and technique development.
0
Science has always been about asking questions, proposing models, and testing those models with experiments or observations. In this sense, the old methods are the new methods. The scientific method does not change. Tools and techniques do change, and generally improve, over time. Often if we are performing a new and complicated experiment, we may not fully trust the results, so go back to a tried and true method that may not be exactly the experiment we want to perform, but we have high confidence in. It is all part of building up evidence and confidence in results. New methods and techniques are built on the previous generation, just like new ideas are grounded in the ideas that came before. Galileo -> Newton -> Einstein -> ?????? -> ??????.
0
Hi Redranga,
Combinations of old and new methods work pretty well. You also have to be able to recognise when you might need to use the older technique or a newer one. In organic chemistry, some people think that you have to always come up with new ways to do reactions, but that certainly isn’t the case. There are several reactions that were discovered long ago and we continue to use them because they work extremely well. You apply them to make your new chemicals, but of course you have to think all the time about which reaction conditions to use in case certain things will affect your particular system badly. If something works well then there is absolutely no need to come up with a whole new method, but if something doesn’t quite work then you do need to think about and adjust the conditions that you use. While some people seem to think we need new reaction methods all the time, some people don’t seem to understand that you can’t necessarily apply the same conditions that everyone else has been doing for years and years! So you really do have to keep thinking about what you are doing.
New instruments/instrumental techniques are being developed a lot, too, so I get to use some pretty cool machines as well, which didn’t necessarily even exist years ago. Or the technique itself has been around for a while, but newer and more powerful machines are always being developed.
0