The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

married, I noticed that there seemed to be a direct
correlation between some of my wife’s bad moods and my
propensity to leave the toilet seat up. (Observation.) I then
thought to myself, perhaps if I put the toilet seat down more
often, my wife’s mood and therefore my own happiness
would improve. (Hypothesis.) I tried putting down the toilet
seat a few times and waiting to see how my wife reacted.
(Testing.) Noticing an improvement in her moods, I started
putting the seat down almost every time, only occasionally
leaving it up to test the continued validity of my hypothesis.
Some folks would call this just being a good
roommate/husband. I call it science.
Believe it or not, the kitchen is perhaps the easiest place
for a regular person to practice science every day. You’ve
certainly performed your own scientific experiments in the
past. Here’s an example: You buy a new toaster with a
darkness knob that goes from one to eleven (just in case you
want it one shade darker than ten) and then notice your toast
is coming out too dark on level six, so you turn it down to
level four. Now your toast is too light. Working from these
two observations, you hypothesize that perhaps five is the
right level for your bread. Lo and behold, your next slice of
toast and every slice of toast after that come out just right.
Now, that may not be the most groundbreaking
observation in the history of science, and it is admittedly
very limited in its application (I mean, you can’t even
guarantee that the next toaster you own will have the same
scale), but it’s science nevertheless, and in that sense, it’s no
different from what professional scientists do every day.
Scientists know that bias can be a powerful force in