Could you elaborate? As an American who hasn't traveled as much as he should, this came as a surprise to me. I always assumed the "scientific method" that we were taught in school was some universal international standard.
Because science does not works by a "scientific method". It work with some really simple things :
- Be sceptical
- Believe the data
- Keep asking questions.
All the rest is just fluff. Most of the time you have experiments before hypothesis. Or an intuition that only match part of it. Or publish some food for though and it will only be proved to be false hundreds of years later. The whole "hypothesis -> experiment -> theory" miss so many things.
From the french wikipedia entry
Très souvent, le terme de « méthode » engage l'idée implicite de son unicité, tant auprès du grand public que de certains chercheurs, qui de surcroît la confondent parfois avec la seule méthode hypothético-déductive. L'étude des pratiques des chercheurs révèle cependant une si grande diversité de démarches et de disciplines scientifiques que l'idée d'une unité de la méthode est rendue très problématique.
Quick and bad translation :
Most of the time, the term "method" push the implicit idea of unicity, to some scientists but also to the public, who also reduce it to the solely "hypothetico-deductive" method. The study of scientists practices reveal a so big diverity of method and scientific fields that the idea of an unicity of the method is highly problematic.
When I was in school "scientific method" wasn’t teached as a separate topic, but more like the result of "osmosis": you are given many examples of how science works and you somehow learn by this the process of science itself. Ok, you are taught how do do proofs in maths and how to do experiments, but no direct reference to a concept like the scientific method.
In the US we do teach about the scientific method as an abstract idea, especially in grade school and high school, but working scientists mostly learn by osmosis here as well. I'd say it serves a role similar to the way finance guys use math models, or musicians use advanced music theory: an idealized description of the way things are done on the ground that you study in school, but rarely use day to day.
