No, the scientific method is fundamental to scientific endeavor. Everything else is just gravy.
A man working alone is doing science, he's just not benefiting society as well as he might. Science isn't "pushing the bounds of human knowledge." Science is forming hypotheses and testing them empirically. When kids drop two objects of different weights to see which falls faster, they're doing science just as much as Galileo was, despite the fact that their findings will never get published.
What a researcher does doesn't magically become "science" when he publishes. It's science all along. If she does it in a cave for years before she publishes, it's still science for all those years she was in her cave.
Children who perform experiments that have been done a million times before are still being scientists.
People who perform experiments but never get published are still scientists.
Science is about the process, it's not about the result.
Science existed before the formulation of the scientific method. The accumulation of knowledge has always been fundamental to science going back to Aristotle.
A man working alone is doing science, he's just not benefiting society as well as he might. Science isn't "pushing the bounds of human knowledge." Science is forming hypotheses and testing them empirically. When kids drop two objects of different weights to see which falls faster, they're doing science just as much as Galileo was, despite the fact that their findings will never get published.
What a researcher does doesn't magically become "science" when he publishes. It's science all along. If she does it in a cave for years before she publishes, it's still science for all those years she was in her cave.
Children who perform experiments that have been done a million times before are still being scientists.
People who perform experiments but never get published are still scientists.
Science is about the process, it's not about the result.