Do you think cutting-edge scientists should earn as much as star athletes, celebrity artists or Wall Street bankers? The Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner does, and this week he put his money where his heart is, depositing $3 million in the bank accounts of each of the nine theoretical physicists he judged to be doing…
Global comparisons of scientific output are commonplace. As non-experts, policymakers and administrators must rely on indexes of impact and recognition — counts of published papers and citations, and the prestige of source journals — to assess the impact of public spending and to allocate research funds. The gold standard is the Scientific Citation Index Expanded,…
Scientists are not robots recording events using mechanically objective methods. Like all human beings, scientists have biases. Indeed, the inherent bias in science has spurred debates over climate change, evolution, and other topics. Nonetheless, the reliability and validity of data used to draw conclusions are the linchpin for scientific progress. We can and must do…
It is natural for those not deeply involved in the half-century quest for the Higgs Boson – one of the most important missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is nature – to ask why they should care about this seemingly esoteric discovery. There are three reasons. First, it caps one of the most remarkable…
From David Barash at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog: When it comes to evolution and human beings, what we don’t know is if anything more interesting than what we do. Among these mysteries, of course, is religion, and among the reasonable hypotheses thus far adduced, there are several based on what I call “overshoot.” The basic…
Researchers should scour historic medical archives to discover knowledge that could inform today’s biomedical research and clinical practice.
Confidence can boost or bust group decisions
We like to know where things come from. We like stories. We like nice tales. We need our myths, our origins, our creations. So uncomfortable is it for us if something doesn’t have a cause that we strive to determine one, one way or the other, even absent the necessary evidence. Psychologist Tania Lombrozo argues…
Ignorance will always grow faster than knowledge. Scientists and laypeople alike would agree that for all we have come to know, there is far more we don’t know. More important, everyday there is far more we know we don’t know. One crucial outcome of scientific knowledge is to generate new and better ways of being…
Scientists’ greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called “beautiful” or “elegant”. Historical examples are Kepler’s explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr’s explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms…