Related papers: The Science Wars: a pox on both their houses
Affective polarization and political sorting drive public antagonism around issues at the science-policy nexus. Looking at the COVID-19 period, we study cross-domain spillover of incivility and contentiousness in public engagements with…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
In this paper I review the problematic relationship between science and philosophy; in particular, I will address the question of whether science needs philosophy, and I will offer some positive perspectives that should be helpful in…
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…
The American scientific community is reeling from funding cuts and policy directives that will debilitate scientific research and education. The underlying hostilities fueling these attacks have intensified in recent years as the COVID-19…
In this paper we illustrate the tension between mainstream 'normal', 'unorthodox' and 'fringe' science that is the focus of two ongoing projects that are analysing the full ecology of physics knowledge. The first project concentrates on…
This volume, \textbf{Physicists Are Still Joking}, serves as a definitive almanac of scientific humor spanning sixty years. It traces the evolution of professional folklore across geopolitical divides and technological eras. \textbf{Part I}…
In 2007 an international conference engaged a reflection on the present conditions for sciences and scientific practice, to initiate a dialogue between science, philosophy, epistemology and sociology. Starting from many examples taken from…
According to the World Economic Forum, the diffusion of unsubstantiated rumors on online social media is one of the main threats for our society. The disintermediated paradigm of content production and consumption on online social media…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about an extraordinary rate of scientific papers on the topic that were discussed among the general public, although often in biased or misinformed ways. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods analysis aimed…
After a short summary of the Sokal Affair and of the point of view of Steven Weinberg, we discuss certain aspects of the scientist ideology present in the last book of Alan Sokal "Pesudoscience ans Postmodernism: Antagonists or…
The claimed unanimity of the scientific community about the human culpability for global warming is questioned. Up today there exists no scientific proof of human culpability. It is not the number of authors of a paper, which validates its…
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…
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a slew of misinformation, often described as an "infodemic". Whereas previous research has focused on the propagation of unreliable sources as a main vehicle of misinformation, the present study focuses…
This paper deals with the history of Density-Wave Spiral Theories in the 1960s. The motivation to write the paper was the publication of two papers on the history of these theories (Pasha 2004a,b). Pasha's papers tell only a part of the…
Ideological considerations have always influenced science, but rarely as directly and massively as in the Soviet Union during the early Cold War period. Cosmology was among the sciences that became heavily politicized and forced to conform…
With the emergence and rapid proliferation of social media platforms and social networking sites, recent years have witnessed a surge of misinformation spreading in our daily life. Drawing on a large-scale dataset which covers more than…
Situations in which no scientific consensus has been reached due to either insufficient, inconclusive or contradicting findings place strain on governments and public organizations which are forced to take action under circumstances of…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
Doing research is fighting, what any other thing the human being could do? Fight against powers or to get powers, that depends on us. Science can be a revolution or deadlocked idleness. Still waters, without hitting the stones along their…