This was what a professor told me about what science is in his "lecture" on study design...
Something along the lines of below...
"Science is
unnatural. Science attempts to
turn human into robots. The scientific method is designed to remove human bias. People are very good at pattern recognition, much better than computers. Unfortunately people will
see patterns when there is none. So the scientific method is a system of approach to get around that. If you do studies that are uncontrolled, non-randomized, and not blinded. Then you're not doing an experiment. You're doing a pilot study. I know I love doing that when I was young. What will happen if you change this and that? How about adding a little bit of those?
We used to call them "Friday afternoon experiments". They're not real experiments. But it's fun."
Oh yes, the scientific method is not "fun", but you need it in order to get unbiased results.
