Related papers: The Science Wars: a pox on both their houses
A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific…
This paper discusses the wartime activities of the astronomer Charles Nordmann from the Paris Observatory. Nordmann was briefly mobilized in 1914 before starting to work on sound-ranging. He also wrote a witness account of the war as well…
The world is facing the challenge of climate crisis. Despite the consensus in scientific community about anthropogenic global warming, the web is flooded with articles spreading climate misinformation. These articles are carefully…
I try to clarify several confusions in the popular literature concerning chaos, determinism, the arrow of time, entropy and the role of probability in physics. Classical ideas going back to Laplace and Boltzmann are explained and defended…
This paper is a continuation of a series of works, devoted to various aspects of the 1908 Tunguska event. A large number of hypotheses about its causes have been put forward already. However, so far none of them has received convincing…
Scientific literature has been growing exponentially for decades, with publications from the last twenty years now comprising 60% of all academic output. While the impact of information overload on news and social-media consumption is…
Seventy-nine physical problems are listed and explained with whose proposed solutions I do not agree. Such disagreements -- even though some of them may simply reflect our preliminary insight into the laws of nature -- have occasionally…
One might have hoped that the immediacy and completeness of scientific information provided through the internet would have made the wrongful appropriation of someone else's ideas --now so easy to detect and document-- a sin of the past.…
Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to…
Introduction: Thorough maintenance of the scientific record is needed to ensure the trustworthiness of its content. This can be undermined by a stealth correction, which is at least one post-publication change made to a scientific article,…
We explore how the polarization around controversial topics evolves on Twitter - over a long period of time (2011 to 2016), and also as a response to major external events that lead to increased related activity. We find that increased…
The creativity of scientists often manifests as localized hot streaks of significant success. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of these influential phases can enhance the effectiveness of support systems and funding allocation,…
Counterfactual statements, e.g., "my headache would be gone had I taken an aspirin" are central to scientific discourse, and are formally interpreted as statements derived from "alternative worlds". However, since they invoke hypothetical…
We examine the tension between academic impact - the volume of citations received by publications - and scientific disruption. Intuitively, one would expect disruptive scientific work to be rewarded by high volumes of citations and,…
Scientific publishing is in a transition between the old paper-bound, static forms and the new electronic media with its interactive, dynamic possibilities. This takes place in the context of imploding library budgets and exploding magazine…
The Internet-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most visited web-sites on the Internet. However, critics have questioned the quality of entries, and an empirical study has shown Wikipedia to contain errors in a…
Our ordinary life changed quite a bit in March of 2020 due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. While spring time in general well awaited and regarded as a synonym for rejuvenation the spring of 2020 brought lock-down, curfew, home office and…
Both religion and science start with basic assumptions that cannot be proved but are taken on faith. Here I note that one basic assumption that is rather common in both enterprises is the assumption that in comparing different hypotheses…
Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also been argued that various scientific fields seem to be trending towards…
Space Science enjoys broad public support in the US. People say they follow developments with interest, and that the programs are worth their cost. This attitude seems to arise in part because of the intrinsic accessibility and appeal of…