Question: What does it mean to analyse data?

David Robertson answered on 17 Jun 2016:

When we do experiments we quite often get a lot of data from them.

For example we might change the temperature of a laser and watch how its frequency changes. We will have lots of measurements of both the temperature and the frequency and want to look at them to see if they are related. E.g. does the frequency increase when the temperature increases.

We might do this by drawing a graph with frequency on one axis and temperature on the other and then looking to see if the graph goes up (frequency increases with temperature), or down(frequency decreases with temperature) or stay the same (frequency doesn’t change with temperature). This is an example of analysing the data. Often there are many more measurements to look at, but the basic idea is the same.

You probably already do this sort of analysis already – we just use analysis as a fancy word for “looking at the data”