Related papers: A Case Study of a Scientific Blunder. History and …
The beliefs of physicists can bias their results towards their expectations in a number of ways. We survey a variety of historical cases of expectation bias in observations, experiments, and calculations.
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…
According to the media, in spring of this year the experiment CDF at Fermilab has made most likely ("this result has a 99.7 percent chance of being correct", Discovery News) a great discovery ("the most significant in physics in half a…
This is a short, light spirited account of how some possibly important science actually happened. It very much conflicts with Popper's contention that the key to scientific progress is falsification.
In an essay published in 1997, M. J. Harris pointed out that the development of a theoretical explanation, or "synthesis," of a group of astronomical results can lead to a situation where subsequent observations are forced to fit within…
The field of condensed matter physics had its genesis this century and it has had a remarkable evolution. A closer look at its growth reveals a hidden aim in the collective consciousness of the field - a part of the development this century…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
In the scientific literature, the term emergent phenomena is invoked in the context of a collective behavior observed in a complex adaptive system that exhibits no correspondence with the behavior of the system constituents. Although this…
In this recent Letter [1], we studied the implications of string Swampland conjectures for quintessence models of dark energy. A couple of days ago, a paper appeared [2] which refers to our work but misrepresents what we have done. Here, we…
An influential argument for scientific realism posits that, if scientific theories were not true, their empirical success would be a coincidence. Here, I show that the false Drude's theory succeeds in explaining the Wiedemann-Franz law by…
Confounding variables are a well known source of nuisance in biomedical studies. They present an even greater challenge when we combine them with black-box machine learning techniques that operate on raw data. This work presents two case…
Symmetry-breaking phase transitions are ubiquitous in condensed matter systems and in quantum field theories. There is also good reason to believe that they feature in the very early history of the Universe. At many such transitions…
The physics of matter in the condensed state is concerned with problems in which the number of constituent particles is vastly greater than can be easily comprehended. The inherent physical limitations of the human mind are fundamental and…
This manuscript was originally submitted to Nature for consideration as a "Brief Communication" in response to a "Corrigendum" that appeared in 2006 (1) to an earlier paper in Nature. That corrigendum was the subject of a Nature editorial…
Nearly 4 years ago, two teams of observational astronomers reported that high-redshift Type Ia supernovae are fainter than expected in a decelerating or freely coasting universe. The radical conclusion that the universe has been…
In recent years, the international scientific community has been rocked by a number of serious cases of research misconduct. In one of these, Woo Suk Hwang, a Korean stem cell researcher published two articles on research with…
Notwithstanding its great influence in modern physics, the EPR thought-experiment has been explained incorrectly a surprising number of times.
The original paper, as published in Nuclear Physics B in 1988, had a few factor-of-two errors. Some people got confused by those errors. The purpose of these errata is to make things clear. The revised version of the complete article is…
In this paper we analyze the status of some `unbelievable results' presented in the paper `On Some Contradictory Computations in Multi-Dimensional Mathematics' [1] published in Nonlinear Analysis, a journal indexed in the Science Citation…
A detailed re-examination of the seminal paper on special relativity, taking into account recent work on the physical interpretation of the space-time Lorentz transformation as well as the modern understanding of classical elecromagnetism…