Related papers: The Science Wars: a pox on both their houses
Inflation is considered as the best theory of the early universe by a very large fraction of cosmologists. However, the validity of a scientific model is not decided by counting the number of its supporters and, therefore, this dominance…
Did time begin at a Big Bang? Will the present expansion of the universe last for a finite or infinite time? These questions sound philosophical but are becoming, now in the twenty-first century, central to the scientific study of…
In the period from about 1890 to 1915 an interdisciplinary and unifying research programme known as "cosmical physics" attracted much scientific and public attention. It typically included aspects of the earth sciences (such as magnetic…
In 1965, I published a paper, exhibiting a hitherto unknown limit of the Lorentz group, which I christened Carroll group because of its seemingly paradoxical physical contents. Since I saw it as more curious than relevant, I published it in…
This essay discusses the relationship between science and religion, specifically the controversy elicited by an article by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, criticizing the scientific establishment for ruling out intelligent design as beyond…
The concept of Science 2.0 was introduced almost a decade ago to describe the new generation of online-based tools for researchers allowing easier data sharing, collaboration and publishing. Although technically sound, the concept still…
Science depends on a communication system, and today that is largely provided by digital technologies such as the internet and web. Despite that digital technologies provide the infrastructure for that communication system, peer-reviewed…
Scientists as diplomats (historical examples). Scientists as advisors to governments and the public. Nongovernmental organisations and international conferences on security questions, initiated by scientists and based on their professional…
The announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle at CERN will be remembered as one of the milestones of the scientific endeavor of the 21st century. In this paper we present a study of information spreading processes on…
In the era of big science, many national governments are helping to build well-funded teams of scientists to serve nationalistic ambitions, providing financial incentives for certain outcomes for purposes other than advancing science. That…
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…
What science does, what science could do, and how to make science work? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the mechanisms of science, going beyond metrics that are easily collectible and…
This article summarizes the process by which astronomers and astrophysicists reached a consensus view as to what are the highest priority scientific projects for the decade of the 1990s. I also review the remarkable success of these…
Contemporary societies are often "polarized", in the sense that sub-groups within these societies hold stably opposing beliefs, even when there is a fact of the matter. Extant models of polarization do not capture the idea that some beliefs…
Neurodivergent people experience the world, conceptualize scientific concepts, and engage with meaning-making differently than their neurotypical peers. When these differences are actualized in an institutional setting, such as higher…
Overconfidence is a prevalent problem and particularly consequential in its relation with scientific knowledge: being unaware of one`s own ignorance can affect behaviours and threaten public policies and health. We introduce both analytical…
It is a matter of debate whether a shrinking proportion of scholarly literature is getting most of the references over time. It is also less well understood how a narrowing literature usage would affect the circulation of ideas in the…
In this paper we show that the dramatic increase in the number of research articles indexed in the Web of Science database impacts the commonly observed distributions of citations within these articles. First, we document that the growing…
The outbreak of the infectious and fatal disease COVID-19 has revealed that pandemics assail public health in two waves: first, from the contagion itself and second, from plagues of suspicion and stigma. Now, we have in our hands and on our…
The global spread of COVID-19 has caused pandemics to be widely discussed. This is evident in the large number of scientific articles and the amount of user-generated content on social media. This paper aims to compare academic…