Say if you decided to change two different things in the experiment and you got a result that you liked and wanted to document… how would you know which of the things you changed was the cause of the positive result? If you change only one at a time you know what caused the result.
February 23rd, 2010 at 8:17 pm
You’re probably supposed to answer this yourself, aren’t you?
Okay, so what would happen if you tried to test two variables at a time? You’d setup this experiment where these cars went a certain distance at a certain speed, using a certain fuel, with the brakes applied with a certain force.
Then, you’d change two things: use a different fuel, and apply the brakes a little more. You make your measurements, and you find that the cars go slower, and burn more fuel. And you have to ask yourself: "why?"
If you do "science" that way, then you’ll have no earthly idea whether it was the effect of the brakes or the change in the fuel that caused the measured change.
Make sense?
References :
February 23rd, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Say if you decided to change two different things in the experiment and you got a result that you liked and wanted to document… how would you know which of the things you changed was the cause of the positive result? If you change only one at a time you know what caused the result.
References :
February 23rd, 2010 at 9:15 pm
When you’re conducting an experiment, you are looking for different outputs given different inputs. If you change two inputs at a time, you won’t know which of the two inputs effected the change to the output.
However, statistical methods exist that allow one to change more than one variable at a time.
References :
February 23rd, 2010 at 9:53 pm
If you make more than one change at a time you cannot prove, with certainty, which change affected the final result. There will be the possibility, however remote, that the changes interacted.
References :