Re: Do scientists still use the scientific method?

There are a number of problems and difficulties associated with "the 
scientific method". One of the biggest ones is that it is not at all clear what 
"the scientific method" is. 

I can pick up any of a number of freshman level university textbooks in 
chemistry, and I will typically find a little section in chapter 1 headed "the 
scientific method". But the textbooks do not exactly agree -- they contradict 
one another in part.

For example, one view is that a scientific hypothesis can never be proved, 
only disproved, and that the scientific method consists in putting forward 
hypotheses and then trying to prove them false. 
Another is that scientists work to confirm and/or disprove hypotheses. 
Some textbooks claim that an hypothesis can be made by making a 
number of observations and then arriving at a generalization. 
Philosophers are generally agreed that knowledge cannot validly be 
obtained from generalization of a number of empirical observations.
 
It is often held that the best theory is one that has withstood a number of 
different attempts to prove it false, and survived. But it is simply not 
realistic to suppose that actual working scientists often direct their 
research towards trying to prove an accepted theory false!

Philosophers of Science have put in a lot of effort trying to work their way 
logically through these sorts of problems. By and large they have not 
reached firm or comfortable conclusions. Scientists themselves are often 
very naive in this area, and the way that they actually work does not match 
very closely with their idealized models of what they think the scientific 
method is.

That having been said, it is definitely and firmly true that scientists do work 
with hypotheses and theories, and that these hypotheses and theories 
are moulded and modified by careful experiment and/or observation, and 
by careful detective work in interpreting the results of experiment and 
observation.

One place to start, if you would like to read more deeply into some of the 
issues, is with some introductory books about Philosophy of Science. 
Two that I would recommend are:

(1) Henry M Bauer "Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific 
Method".
(2) Alan Chalmers "What is this Thing Called Science"

(Please pardon my Aussie bias!)