Related papers: Is Science going through a critical stage?
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
With rising life expectancies around the world and an older scientific workforce than ever before, what does aging mean for individual scientists, and what do aging scientists mean for scientific progress as a whole? Here we examine how…
We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so…
One of the fundamental questions in science is how scientific disciplines evolve and sustain progress in society. No studies to date allows us to explain the endogenous processes that support the evolution of scientific disciplines and…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
Communication of scientific knowledge beyond the walls of science is key to science's societal impact. Media channels play sizable roles in disseminating new scientific ideas about human health, economic welfare, and government policy as…
In their position paper entitled "Towards a new, complexity science of learning and education", Jorg et al. (2007) argue that educational research is in crisis. In their opinion, the transdisciplinary and interdiscursive approach of…
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…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
From the days when superconductivity was discovered its science was entangled by the unresolved problem of the relationship between superconductive state, its crystal structure and its phase transitions. The problem was exacerbated by the…
Although we accept that Physics is, as a last resort, an experimental science, the relationship between theory and experiment is far away from being trivial. Any experiment is always explained within a determinate theoretical context and,…
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein prior accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton's words, "stand on the shoulders of…
In the quest to align deep learning with the sciences to address calls for rigor, safety, and interpretability in machine learning systems, this contribution identifies key missing pieces: the stages of hypothesis formulation and testing,…
Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked…
In recent years, by theory and observation cosmology has advanced substantially. Parameters of the concordance or $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model are given with unprecedented precision ("precision cosmology"). On the other side, 95% of the…
Measurement is a complicated but very necessary task. Many indices have been created in an effort to define the quality of knowledge produced but they have attracted strong criticism, having become synonymous with individualism, competition…
This paper critically examines the models of scientific discovery propounded by Kuhn, McArthur, Hudson, and Schindler. As an alternative, we proffer the $\unicode{x201c}$change$\unicode{x2013}$driver model$\unicode{x201c}$. It conceives of…
Academic research is driven by several factors causing different disciplines to act as "sources" or "sinks" of knowledge. However, how the flow of authors' research interests -- a proxy of human knowledge -- evolved across time is still…
Laymen and sometimes even physicists think of natural sciences, in particular of theoretical and mathematical physics often as subjects, which unfold according to an intrinsic logical pattern, with the limitations being set only by the…