Expert: John Locke - 8/20/2007

Question
He needs to write a "hypothesis" on "WHY ARE WHITE SHIRTS COOLER THEN DARK SHIRTS"   

we then need to write out the procedures for conducting the study and include data tables and neccesary tables....

can you please try and explain how we can do this...my son just came to live with me and is not use to doing homework, as his other parents did not ever sit down with him to do it...any help you can give me sure would be appreciated....thank you in advanced...

Answer
Thanks for using AllExperts, Judy. A point before I begin: many of the respondents here prefer not to answer questions that are phrased frankly as homework or homework-related questions. If any future questions should be put into the question pool, you may wish to a different expert or redirect your question to another area on the site. In this case, for instance, my first recommendation would be to ask your question in the physics area:

http://www.allexperts.com/el/Physics/

The reason things are hotter or cooler is fundamentally a problem of heat transfer, rather than anything biological. That said, I can certainly help you work out this hypothesis.

The word "hypothesis" itself comes from the Greek for supposition, and that's exactly what it is: a proposed explanation as to why white shirts are cooler than dark shirts (more generally, it's a proposed explanation as to why things work the way they do). Your hypothesis will take the form of "White shirts are cooler than dark shirts because of [some mechanism]." The first step, always, is to understand the background of your subject: that means research. I would suggest looking at how heat moves from one thing to another, color, and the body's mechanism for controlling its temperature. Descriptions geared toward the layman can be found online for all of these.

Once you have your background, you'll need to synthesize that information and actually propose a mechanism. Let me suggest some questions to help you: How does heat move? Would a dark shirt tend to absorb or give off heat? Would a white shirt tend to absorb or give off heat? What differences are there between a white and black shirt?

Your experiment, obviously, does not end there (for thousands of years, philosophers were content to stop at this point with their proposed explanations; it is a triumph of science that we actually started testing these ideas). The next step is propose an experiment in which you test the hypothesis; this experiment could either support the hypothesis or disprove it, depending on the data that you get. Again, let me ask some questions to help you along with this. What are you trying to measure? Since you're testing the difference between white and black shirts, how would make sure that everything else besides the color of the shirt is the same between experiments? What materials will you need to conduct this experiment? At minimum, you'll need some white and black shirts, a heat source, some kind of timing device, and a method for measuring the heat absorbed by each shirt.

At this point, you assemble all the necessary materials, construct the experimental apparatus, and conduct the experiment. I don't know if you actually need to carry out this experiment; regardless, once you have the data, you must format them so that they can be easily understood. Far more has been written on this than I could possibly summarize here, so let me direct you to a good source on formatting:

http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWsections.html  

Scientific papers also require some discussion of the results (what happened and why you think it happened; what you would do differently next time), along with a conclusion: what did the experiment show you?

I wish you the best of luck.