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Even Boltzmann had trouble with probability
Boltzmann was one of the genius founders of statistical thermodynamics, and yet the subtleties of probability tripped him up: From “Compendium of the foundations of classical statistical physics” by...
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Very old cave art shows how technology drives science
The exciting science news in this week’s issue of Science is that some cave art in Europe is much, much older than previously thought, dating back to the earliest humans in Europe. The new dates make...
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The state of R01 funding and how we got here
A snippet from Paula Stephan’s How Economics Shapes Sciencep. 141-143, Harvard University Press, 2012: “The NIH Doubling: A Cautionary Tale” It is tempting to assume that money is the answer to many of...
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Pursue ignorance, learn science
Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. – Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner Dr. Stewart Firestein, a...
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Certifiably reproducible science… meh
A movement is afoot to create formal structures to reproduce experiments (Ars Technica): Almost nobody goes back and repeats something that’s already been published, though. But maybe they should. At...
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Not being an experimentalist is no excuse for not understanding experiments
Why are so many non-reproducible experiments so highly cited? Part of the problem may be a growing cultural change in biology: not everyone does experiments now. More and more, biologists are divided...
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Time to (re)read Thomas Kuhn
I will admit that I’m a sucker for book anniversaries of any sort, and since this month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, here’s your excuse to...
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How science climbs out of the chaotic morass and into paradigms and puzzles
Welcome to the first meeting of The Finch and Pea’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 50th anniversary bull session book club. Grab a drink, pull up a chair, and let’s talk about the first four...
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If you want a paradigm shift, don’t go looking for it
“In science… novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.” – Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Organizations that...
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The hard…is what makes it great
There are a lot of things to love in this piece from Christie Aschwanden about why retractions, studies that don’t hold up to reproduction, and even sub-fraudulent “p-hacking” do not mean that science...
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