People who study the process of learning say that most people
learn best - meaning a deeper, longer-lasting understanding is
achieved - when they are actively engaged in finding answers to
questions. You can cram your head full of facts and ideas with the
aid of a book or a series of traditional lectures, but studies have
shown that this material is not retained - it drains out of you brain
just like water out of the tub (it has a short residence time). The
kind of experimentation encouraged throughout this book is a way of
getting involved in finding answers and creating understanding that I
hope will prove effective. At the very least, I hope this approach
will expose the reader to the process of solving problems through
experimentation in the classical sense of designing an experiment to
answer a question or test a prediction made by a hypothesis, then
comparing the results with a control and finally drawing conclusions
and generating new questions from these results. This is how
scientists create knowledge and it is good to become familiar with
this process, in part because this process can be applied far beyond
the confines of what we call science.
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