Question: How many scientist does it take to do one experiment? Could you do it on your own?

Reka Nagy answered on 9 Nov 2016:

You sure could! An experiment is just a fancy way of saying ‘There is a question and I am going to try and answer it by doing something!’.

Does an egg break if you drop it?
If it falls on concrete, probably. But if it falls on a pillow, it might not! The only way to be sure is to perform an experiment – by dropping the egg on the pillow and seeing what happens (note: tell your parents you are doing an experiment before doing this on your own!).

And if you want to do great science, to give your experiment meaning, you need to perform a control experiment as well – this is an experiment where you know what the outcome should be, so if you do not get this outcome, there is something wrong with your experiment and you can go back and troubleshoot it.

Using the previous example, you drop an egg on a pillow and it doesn’t break. OK, but what does this mean? Did you drop the egg from high enough? Was it a real egg or one made of rubber or wood?

You can do a control experiment to check this: you know that if you drop an egg on concrete, it will break. So if you drop an egg on concrete and it DOESN’T break, it means one of several things may be wrong in the way you did your experiment:
1. You did not drop the egg from high enough. Try standing on a chair and repeating the experiment!
2. You are using a rubber or wooden egg! Try getting a fresh one from the fridge instead.

Of course some experiments are a lot more complicated than this and it may require the knowledge and resources of several scientists to do it, but that is not a requirement to do an experiment!