Provocative questions:
Is explorative science bad science?
Do we always need hypotheses when asking questions or exploring data & patterns?
Observations/patterns can be new without having a pre-formulated hypothesis.
Thoughts?
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I think you have a good point here, a hypothesis, If I understnd it is an idea.
I am sure a lot of things were discovered by accident, radiation for example, marie curie left a photographic plate out near a radio active substance, then questioned what and reacted with the plate.
I am sure sometimes we try and make the result fit the data as we think something has gone wrong when our predictions don't match, this is fine to reproduce things to rule out errors or other factors.
