Related papers: Between understanding and control: Science as a cu…
Reliability has long been treated as an engineering practice supported by testing, statistics and standards, yet its status as a scientific discipline remains unsettled. From a philosophical perspective, scientific truth is characterized by…
We shall discuss some aspects of science and technology, their increasing role in the society, the fast advances in modern science, the apparent decrease of interest of the young generation in basic sciences, the importance of proper…
The birth and decline of disciplines are critical to science and society. However, no quantitative model to date allows us to validate competing theories of whether the emergence of scientific disciplines drives or follows the formation of…
Indigenous Australian practices, developed and honed over thousands of years, weave science with storytelling. In this Indigenous science series, we'll look at different aspects of First Australians' traditional life and uncover the…
Both Albert Einstein and Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger have defined what science is. Einstein includes not only physics, but also all natural sciences dealing with both organic and inorganic processes in his definition of science. According to…
When we teach physics to prospective scientists and engineers we are teaching more than the "facts" of physics - more, even, than the methods and concepts of physics. We are introducing them to a complex culture - a mode of thinking and the…
It is argued that human consciousness is likely to have emerged during the self-consistent evolution of the physical universe, through the gradual accumulation of biological entities' ability to tap into the intrinsic non-deterministic…
Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of…
In this manuscript a joint project between young researchers from all around the world, the Intercultural Science-Art Project, is presented, in which all participants interpreted their own research with art. Art is meant in the most…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
This article aims to show the weakness of the current scientific assessments, based on a set of contradictory pseudo-axioms. The six pseudo-axioms are deeply analysed. From the analysis are derived several conclusions. In spite of the…
The problem of identifying common concepts in the sciences and deciding when new ideas have emerged is an open one. Metascience researchers have sought to formalize principles underlying stages in the life-cycle of scientific research,…
Scientific understanding is a fundamental goal of science, allowing us to explain the world. There is currently no good way to measure the scientific understanding of agents, whether these be humans or Artificial Intelligence systems.…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
World population and the number of cultural artifacts are growing exponentially or faster, while cultural interaction approaches the fidelity of a global nervous system. Every day hundreds of millions of images are loaded into social…
The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social…
Scientific progress is inherently sequential: collective knowledge is updated as new studies enter the literature. We propose the sequential meta-analysis research trace (SMART), which quantifies the influence of each study at the time it…
Imagine an oracle that correctly predicts the outcome of every particle physics experiment, the products of every chemical reaction, or the function of every protein. Such an oracle would revolutionize science and technology as we know…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…