It may surprise you to learn that not every scientist spends their days working in a chemical laboratory with bubbling solutions of exotic red and green liquids in elaborate looking glassware and their evenings staring through large telescopes at the night sky. In fact most scientists spend their days working with rather ordinary materials trying to find ways to improve the performance of those materials, better ways to produce those materials at lower costs, and make them environmentally friendly.
How do they do this? In school, we learned about the “scientific method”. This remains the basis for all this work. It involves the following basic steps:
1. Develop hypotheses
2. Design and conduct robust experiments, ensuring the experiments use quality test designs that are repeatable and reproducible
3. Analyze the data
4. Make conclusions as to whether or not the data support the hypothesis – taking into account the significance of any variations
5. Communicate the results
When all these steps are followed, the results lead to enormous scientific breakthroughs! Breakthroughs that revolutionized the world…including cleaning products.
The articles in this section will give you an in-depth look at the basic science behind many of the common components of cleaning products. These articles also explain why these components are necessary and included in the cleaning products you use everyday.