What is a necessary quality of a scientific fact?

Prepare for the Arizona State University BME100 Biomedical Engineering Midterm Exam. Enhance your skills with quizzes, flashcards, and detailed explanations. Ace your exam!

A necessary quality of a scientific fact is that it must be immutable and highly replicable. This means that a scientific fact should remain constant regardless of who's observing or measuring it, which establishes its reliability and validity. Additionally, a scientific fact must be highly replicable, meaning that different researchers should be able to observe the same fact under the same conditions repeatedly. This property is crucial in the scientific method to ensure that the findings are not simply anomalies or due to random chance.

In the context of scientific inquiry, facts are built upon observations and data that can be confirmed through experimentation and observation by multiple individuals across different situations and contexts. This consistency is what lends credibility to scientific knowledge and allows it to be used in further research and applications within various fields, including biomedical engineering.

The other options represent qualities that are not aligned with the foundational principles of scientific inquiry. For instance, subjectivity and opinion lack the objectivity required for scientific facts, while being based solely on hypotheses does not provide the necessary empirical evidence to be classified as a fact. Thus, the quality of being immutable and highly replicable fundamentally defines what a scientific fact is.

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