Related papers: Investing for Discovery in Astronomy
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
Discoveries come through exclusions, confirmations or revolutionary findings with respect to a theory canon populated by the Standard Model (SM) and beyond the SM (BSM) theories. Guaranteed discoveries are accomplished only through pursuit…
Team science dominates scientific knowledge production, but what makes academic teams successful? Using temporal data on 25.2 million publications and 31.8 million authors, we propose a novel network-driven approach to identify and study…
Infrastructures are not inherently durable or fragile, yet all are fragile over the long term. Durability requires care and maintenance of individual components and the links between them. Astronomy is an ideal domain in which to study…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
Open Science has been a rising theme in the landscape of science policy in recent years. The goal is to make research that emerges from publicly funded science to become findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) for use by…
In order to attract and retain excellent researchers and diverse individuals in astrophysics, we recommend action be taken in several key areas impacting young scientists: (1) Maintain balance between large collaborations and individual…
Advances in astronomy are often enabled by adoption of new technology. In some instances this is where the technology has been invented specifically for astronomy, but more usually it is adopted from another scientific or industrial area of…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
The Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD) believes that in order for astronomy-for-development activities to be effective, a scientific approach is required. Evaluation is an essential component in identifying which projects work best,…
A major gap exists between the conceptual suggestion of how much a nation should invest in science, innovation, and technology, and the practical implementation of what is done. We identify 4 critical challenges that must be address in…
Astronomy has played a major part in the development of civilisations, not only through conceptual developments, but most importantly through the very practical gains obtained through the observation of Sun, Moon planets and stars. Space…
The era of data-intensive astronomy is being ushered in with the increasing size and complexity of observational data across wavelength and time domains, the development of algorithms to extract information from this complexity, and the…
The dream of building machines that can do science has inspired scientists for decades. Remarkable advances have been made recently; however, we are still far from achieving this goal. In this paper, we focus on the scientific discovery…
Nowadays there is no field research which is not flooded with data. Among the sciences, Astrophysics has always been driven by the analysis of massive amounts of data. The development of new and more sophisticated observation facilities,…
In the distant past, astronomy was often intertwined with religion into a unified cosmos. As science became a distinct cultural enterprise, astronomy has witnessed a variety of rich interactions with other fields. Mathematical statistics…
Will it be possible in the future to realize large, complex space missions dedicated to basic science like HST, Chandra and JWST? Or will their cost be too great? Today's space scene is completely different from that of even five years ago,…
We review the current state of data mining and machine learning in astronomy. 'Data Mining' can have a somewhat mixed connotation from the point of view of a researcher in this field. If used correctly, it can be a powerful approach,…
We write in response to the call from the 2020 Decadal Survey to submit white papers illustrating the most pressing scientific questions in astrophysics for the coming decade. We propose exploration as the central question for the Decadal…