The scientific method, as we usually learn it, starts with a hypothesis. The scientist begins with a guess, and asks a question with a clear answer: true, or false? That guess lets them design an experiment, observe the consequences, and improve our knowledge of the world.

But where did the scientist get the hypothesis in the first place? Often, through some form of exploratory research.

Exploratory research is research done, not to answer a precise question, but to find interesting questions to ask. Each field has their own approach to exploration. A psychologist might start with interviews, asking broad questions to find narrower questions for a future survey. An ecologist might film an animal, looking for changes in its behavior. A chemist might measure many properties of a new material, seeing if any stand out. Each approach is like digging for treasure, not sure of exactly what you will find.

Mathematicians and theoretical physicists don’t do experiments, but we still need hypotheses. We need an idea of what we plan to prove, or what kind of theory we want to build: like other scientists, we want to ask a question with a clear, true/false answer. And to find those questions, we still do exploratory research.

What does exploratory research look like, in the theoretical world? Often, it begins with examples and calculations. We can start with a known method, or a guess at a new one, a recipe for doing some specific kind of calculation. Recipe in hand, we proceed to do the same kind of calculation for a few different examples, covering different sorts of situation. Along the way, we notice patterns: maybe the same steps happen over and over, or the result always has some feature.

We can then ask, do those same steps always happen? Does the result really always have that feature? We have our guess, our hypothesis, and our attempt to prove it is much like an experiment. If we find a proof, our hypothesis was true. On the other hand, we might not be able to find a proof. Instead, exploring, we might find a counterexample – one where the steps don’t occur, the feature doesn’t show up. That’s one way to learn that our hypothesis was false.

This kind of exploration is essential to discovery. As scientists, we all have to eventually ask clear yes/no questions, to submit our beliefs to clear tests. But we can’t start with those questions. We have to dig around first, to observe the world without a clear plan, to get to a point where we have a good question to ask.