A laboratory report contains a section devoted to Materials and Methods. This is important because it indicates how to repeat the experiment or exercise as closely as it was performed initially. It reads out a little like a recipe. In a recipe, we know what the input materials are. We often refer to the ingredients as reagents since we often expect some sort of reaction to occur in our scientific inquiry. But ingredients alone do not adequately aid in the reproduction of an experiment. The methodology is equally important. Therefore, the language of the methodology must be clear and precise. We must respect the order in which procedures occur otherwise the outcomes will be different. Below is a food recipe as an example of how culinary experiments are performed. With the provided recipe — a series of materials and methods– we can try to reproduce the dish. We can also identify areas that can be varied with respect to materials and the methodology that would alter or enhance the outcome. In science, sometimes the methodology is fundamentally flawed and must be altered. The transparency of the process is important because it permits a review by peers to review and judge the validity of subsequent results.
How to make Cambodian style fish with spicy tomato sauce
The following is found at Open Source food and is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by user Paula
Ingredients
- 1 gilt-head (sea) bream, cleaned and pat dry with paper towel
- 2 tablespoons of cornstarch
- 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil
- 1 clove of garlic, minced
- 1/2 onion, diced
- 1 stalk of celery, sliced
- 1 tomato, cubed
- 1 tablespoon fish sauce
- 1 teaspoon soy sauce
- 1/2 tablespoon sugar
- 2 dried hot chili peppers, sliced
- Dash of black pepper
- spring onion and basil leaves for garnish
Directions
- Sprinkle fish with cornstarch.
- Heat 2 tablespoon of oil and fry fish, when it’s golden brown remove from wok.
- Clean wok, heat 1 tablespoon of oil and fry garlic and onion about 1 minute, add celery, dried chili and tomato, stir and fry 4 minutes.
- Add fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar and black pepper.
- Pour tomato sauce over fish and garnish with spring onion, basil.
What’s different with these Materials/Methods?
Remember that we use metric units in science. Fortunately, volumetric measurements like tablespoon and teaspoon are standardly converted to milliliters. We’re not so lucky with other types of volumetric measurements, such as the Pint. One needs to be careful when speaking of pints since the imperial pint and the U.S. pint are different measurements. The dry pint obfuscates things further. Regardless of understanding these differences in measure, it is always preferable to speak in a standard term with scientific measurements reported in metric units. Let’s not even begin trying to fathom a conversion for a dash. Methods, in science, are not written out so plainly in a pointed form. The language is more descriptive. As we can see, there are many variations in outcomes for the included recipe. The methodology is a bit vague (lacking temperatures and standardization in cooking vessels). We have to remember that methodology in science should be much more repeatable.
