Related papers: Is Science going through a critical stage?
Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable…
Newton's centuries-old wisdom of standing on the shoulders of giants raises a crucial yet underexplored question: Out of all the prior works cited by a discovery, which one is its giant? Here, we develop a novel, discipline-independent…
The peculiar velocities of galaxies are driven by gravity, and hence hold the promise of probing details of how gravity forms structures. In particular it is possible to constrain cosmological parameters and to test extensions to the…
Paradoxes are a relatively frequent occurrence in physics. The nature of their genesis is diverse and they are found in all branches of physics. There are a number of general and special classifications of paradoxes, but there are no…
Science of science (SciSci) is an emerging discipline wherein science is used to study the structure and evolution of science itself using large data sets. The increasing availability of digital data on scholarly outcomes offers…
On the occasion of centenary of superconductivity discovery I remind some facts from the first period and attempts to understand the phenomenon. It turns out that most famous physicists of the first half of XX century have tried to solve…
The study of many body physics has provided a scientific playground of surprise and continuing revolution over the past half century. The serendipitous discovery of new states and properties of matter, phenomena such as superfluidity, the…
At any time, there are areas of science where we are standing at the frontier of knowledge, and can wonder whether we have reached a fundamental limit to human understanding. What is ultimately possible in physics? I will argue here that it…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
Gravity plays an important part in the experiments and discoveries of the modern world. But how was it discovered? Surely Newton and Einstein were not the only people to observe it and account for it. It had been a long path before the full…
Recent research\cite{fort} has shown that in the 20th century there is an exponential growth of the number of published scientific papers, but new ideas has only a linear growth with time. The 19th and the first half of the 20th century saw…
Experiment plays a decisive role in physics. It is the single source of our understanding of nature. But, during the last century the main accent in theoretical physics has moved toward metaphysics. Some mathematicians/theoreticians try to…
The study of microorganisms, or microbiology, has demonstrated significant development since its inception and is currently a key field of biological sciences that has a huge impact on modern society and scientific research. Over the…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
Science progresses by building upon previous discoveries. It is commonly believed that the impact of scientific papers, as measured by citations, is positively correlated with the impact of past discoveries built upon. However, analyzing…
The scientific method is the cornerstone of human progress across all branches of the natural and applied sciences, from understanding the human body to explaining how the universe works. The scientific method is based on identifying…
The use of science for policy is at the core of a perfect storm generated by the insurgence of several concurrent crises: of science, of trust, of sustainability. The modern positivistic model of science for policy, known as evidence based…
The recognition of the agency of the knower has enormously enriched our understanding of knowledge production. There is a growing realization that what we know about how we know affects our interpretation of reality. This realization…
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…