The aim of science is the betterment of humanity. Scientists are constantly working with the same aim in their minds. The term scientist certainly rings the names of great scientists like Einstein, Newton, Archimedes, Lavoisier, Galileo
etc. They are obviously great scientists. However, the meaning of the term scientist has the scope for you too to be called so. Indeed, science is that knowledge which is gleaned out of systematic experimentation. The process to glean knowledge by experimenting is known as research. One who carries out such research is a scientist. Therefore, if you carry out research, you can also be a scientist. Experimenting through a perfect and systematic process in order to learn something is called research. It means, there is a certain procedure to carry out a research. Research in chemistry also follows some procedure. Now we shall learn the steps of this procedure.
In the first step of a research, you need to determine what you want to learn or what new thing you want to invent. Suppose, you want to learn whether heat will be produced or absorbed as ammonium chloride is dissolved in water. This is known as topic selection.
In the second step, you have to investigate the matter. At this stage, you will read some books or some papers from the internet and other sources in order to learn how such kind of an experiment was carried out by someone else and what
result it did yield. Suppose, you have learned that another chemical compound calcium oxide, when dissolved in water, produces heat. You will also be able to learn what kind of apparatus, chemicals and steps were followed in this experiment. That will give you an idea about what things you will require to conduct the test yourself. Besides, you will have an idea about the probable result- in this case, if you dissolve ammonium chloride in water, heat will be produced.
Again, you will be able to decide what kind of materials you are going to use and what will be the steps of the experiment. You came to know that you would need a beaker, water, ammonium chloride, thermometer, glass rod, balance etc. First you will take water in the beaker. You will record the temperature of the water in the beaker with the thermometer. Then, you will weigh ammonium chloride using the balance and mix and dissolve that with the glass rod in the water, a number of times. Each time, you need to check the temperature of water. This is the procedure of your experiment. Now you can start your experiment.
If you analyze the data shown above, you will see, the more ammonium chloride is dissolved in water, the less the temperature ofwater becomes. You will decide, since dissolving ammonium chloride in water decreases the temperature of water, ammonium chloride absorbs heat from water in order to get dissolved. The result is dissolving ammonium chloride in water results in absorption of temperature. The steps followed by you in the above experiment can be shown in the following flowchart:
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