Related papers: Is Faith The Enemy Of Science?
The origins of Sociophysics are discussed from a personal testimony. I trace back its history to the late seventies. My twenty years of activities and research to establish and promote the field are reviewed. In particular the conflicting…
Insofar as Sir Karl Raimund Popper's writings deal with political statements, they are evident; yet insofar as they deal with scientific issues, they are misleading. If applied to the concrete implementation of science, such as distribution…
In this paper, it is argued that theoretical physics is more akin to an organism than to a rigid structure.It is in this sense that the epithet, "sick", applies to it. It is argued that classical physics is a model of a healthy science, and…
I briefly present a personal view about alleged scientific results on free will.
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…
Since the seminal paper by Tversky and Kahneman, the conjunction fallacy has been the subject of multiple debates and become a fundamental challenge for cognitive theories in decision-making. In this article, we take a rather uncommon…
How should software engineering be adapted for Computational Science (CS)? If we understood that, then we could better support software sustainability, verifiability, reproducibility, comprehension, and usability for CS community. For…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
In high-stakes domains like medicine, it may be generally desirable for models to faithfully adhere to the context provided. But what happens if the context does not align with model priors or safety protocols? In this paper, we investigate…
Research in foundations of physics is stagnant, as claimed by many scientists during the last years. I suggest that one reason might be the reification of language, particularly of mathematics, which favour the search for answers to wrong…
This essay, written by a statistician and a climate scientist, describes our view of the gap that exists between current practice in mainstream climate science, and the practical needs of policymakers charged with exploring possible…
This article describes epistemological distinctions between science and history. Science investigates models of natural law using repeatable experiments as the ultimate arbiter. In contrast, history investigates past events by considering…
There is no mysterious link between mathematics and physics, because both of them are human inventions designed to study the world.
A sketch of some of the fundamental notions related to the nature of knowledge is offered, with special focus on the role of mathematics and my own opinions. No single idea exposed here is entirely original; indeed, this topic has been…
Knowledge of how science is consumed in public domains is essential for a deeper understanding of the role of science in human society. While science is heavily supported by public funding, common depictions suggest that scientific research…
Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible - i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically…
We investigated the epistemological conceptions of the uruguayan Physics teachers and future Physics teachers through the application of the CLASS test (Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey), one of the most accepted instruments…
Some scientists take themselves and their work very seriously. However, there are plenty of cases of humour being combined with science. Here I review some examples from the broad fields of physics and astronomy, particularly focusing on…
Physics is so successful today in understanding the nature of matter. What can it say about mind ? Is it possible to have a unified theory of matter and mind within the framework of modern science ? Is Consciousness an accident or is it a…