They discuss the nuances of cherry processing, roasting, storage, and brewing at every opportunity. They’ll even wait in line for twenty minutes for a $10 cup of coffee! And these are just ordinary people, not coffee professionals!
Coffee has become a worthy hobby and intense passion for all sorts of people. People want to learn as much as they can about coffee and they want answers to all sorts of questions brewing in their heads. What, then, is more appropriate than providing answers to some of those questions in a fun way that doesn’t feel too much like a high school classroom? While there are many coffee books available, this one is different. It attempts to look at myriad coffee ideas and explore them using scientific principles, scientifically acquired data, and peer-reviewed publications.
Even though the scientific method isn’t foolproof and there are other ways of acquiring truth and knowledge, science has generally proven to be a good way of exploring the world. The scientific method The scientific method involves learning about a topic, generating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, analyzing the results, and drawing a conclusion. This is all done as objectively as possible and according to rules and principles that allow others to scrutinize the process. Science, at its core, is about capturing variation and understanding that variation mathematically.
In the natural world, there is variation: Human height varies, leaf weight varies, color varies, sugar levels vary…. By examining many randomly selected individuals in a population, you can get a sense of what the average value for a trait is within that population and how much variation (distance from the average) exists.
The more individuals you measure, the better you’ll understand that population. As an example, measuring the heights of ten people and averaging them will probably give a poor value for average human height because the variation will be so large. But measuring the height of 1,000 people will produce much more accurate values of the variation and the average.
Ultimately, scientists ask the question of whether two populations are the same or different. They do this by measuring the average values for a trait in each population and then calculating how much the variation overlaps between the two populations. Depending on how much overlap exists, the populations are considered different (although, different is never absolute; scientists always calculate a probability of making an error). All of this calculating is done using the mathematical field of statistics.
Often, scientists create the different populations they are interested in studying. They may add fertilizer to one field but not another or give three groups of dogs different levels of medication. They strive to control all the sources of variation that might influence the populations so that when they finally measure what they’re interested in, the difference between the populations is a result of their manipulations, not an event related to something else.
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