Abstract
This chapter focuses on research methods and their historical development, from the seventeenth century to the current age. It recalls the foundational contributions by giants like Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and many others. It distills the essence of the experimental method and discusses the logic mechanisms—induction and deduction—which drive it together with creativity and ingenuity. It discusses the notion of validity of research results and the approaches through which scientists can provide evidence (and confidence) of validity.
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Notes
- 1.
There is no real evidence that the experiment actually took place. Most historians consider it to be an explanatory example rather than a physical experiment.
- 2.
Interestingly, Galileo built the telescope and used it even before he had a theory to explain how it worked. He developed the theory afterwards, to justify his observations. This is another striking example of the possible interplay between theory and practice in research.
- 3.
A similar statement was expressed in modern time by the famous physicist Richard Feynman [15]. These are his equally beautiful words:
To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature …If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.
- 4.
Hereafter, I use the terms creativity and ingenuity interchangeably.
- 5.
To understand more the notion of abstraction, the reader may refer to the work by Jeff Kramer [28], who cogently articulates how this skill is key to Informatics.
- 6.
They are valid with respect to inertial frames of reference, which hold in most practical settings. In particular, the speed one works with must be much less than the speed of light, otherwise relativistic mechanics must be used instead of Newton’s mechanics.
- 7.
The perihelion is the point in the orbit that is nearest to the sun.
- 8.
The precession is a change in the orientation of the rotational axis.
- 9.
From now on, to avoid gender biased expressions, I alternate between using “he” and “she”, to avoid the awkward use of “he or she.”
- 10.
Assuming that one repeats the same order only if satisfied by it.
- 11.
A very special (and important) case is reachability of the termination statement of a program. If the termination statement is unreachable, the program never terminates.
- 12.
More on this is discussed in Sect. 3.6.
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Ghezzi, C. (2020). Research Methodology. In: Being a Researcher. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45157-8_2
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