相关论文: From "Not Wrong" to (Maybe) Right
Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…
Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…
Critically growing problems of fundamental science organisation and content are analysed with examples from physics and emerging interdisciplinary fields. Their origin is specified and new science structure (organisation and content) is…
In a commentary published in mid-2024 (to which the present work is a direct response), a number of scientists argue that U.S. funding agencies have "politicized" the process by which grants are awarded, in service of diversifying the…
Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…
Toby Walsh in 'The Singularity May Never Be Near' gives six arguments to support his point of view that technological singularity may happen but that it is unlikely. In this paper, we provide analysis of each one of his arguments and arrive…
A common flaw of astronomers is to believe that they know the truth even when data is scarce. I provide ten examples where this approach led to wrong strategic decisions in research plans, causing unnecessary delays in finding the truth. In…
Oscillations are observed in all branches of science and culture, ranging from the behavior of ele-mentary particles, atoms, molecules in simple chemical or physical systems or even in complex organisms, up to oscillations of the behavior…
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…
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in cosmology and particle astrophysics. So much so that anyone who dares to offer an overview would certainly risk him- or herself for being incomplete and biased at best, and even incorrect due to…
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…
An overview of the experimental and observational status in gravitational physics is given, both for the known tests of general relativity and Newtonian gravity, but also for the increasing number of results where these theories run into…
Some scientists write literary fiction books in their spare time. If these books contain scientific knowledge, literary fiction becomes a mechanism of knowledge transfer. In this case, we could conceptualize literary fiction as non-formal…
The present politically correct consensus is that increased exchange of scientific insight, knowledge, practitioners and skills at the global level brings significant benefits to all. The quantifiable scientometric changes during the last…
The fact that the author of an excellent textbook on electromagnetism could be duped by "hidden momentum" vividly illustrates the problematic nature of its use.
Although not explicitly declared, most research rankings of countries and institutions are supposed to reveal their contribution to the advancement of knowledge. However, such advances are based on very highly cited publications with very…
This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time,…
One of the main goals of scientific research is to provide a description of the empirical data which is as accurate and comprehensive as possible, while relying on as few and simple assumptions as possible. In this paper, I propose a…
This paper discusses the likelihood of whether the Pioneer anomaly is due to 'mundane' systematic errors/effects or indicative of new or unappreciated physics. The main aim of this paper is to argue that recent publications suggesting that…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…