相关论文: Is Science going through a critical stage?

We venture that the long evolution of science may be viewed as unfolding over three blurred epochs. The first epoch spans the slow, haphazard, error-ridden realization of scientific truths along with foundational scientific methods. The…

Environmental determinism in the past followed from the belief that the gods bestowed political power and the best possible weather on the sponsors of early scholars. Although later discredited in academia because of the associations with…

We envision future technologies through science fiction, strategic planning, or academic research. Yet, our expectations do not always match with what actually unfolds, much like navigating a story where some events align with expectations…

The sciences of complexity present some recurrent themes: the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors in dissipative systems out of equilibrium, the aparent tendency of complex system to lie at the border of phase transitions and…

The constantly growing body of scholarly knowledge of science, technology, and humanities is an asset of the mankind. While new discoveries expand the existing knowledge, they may simultaneously render some of it obsolete. It is crucial for…

Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…

A reliable understanding of the Earth system is essential for the life quality of modern society. Natural hazards are the cause of most life and resource losses. The ability to define the conditions for a sustainable development of…

Scientific fields differ in terms of their subject matter, research techniques, collaboration sizes, rates of growth, and so on. We investigate whether common dynamics might lurk beneath these differences, affecting how scientific fields…

Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…

During the past two decades, cosmologists turned to particle physics in order to explore the physics of the very early Universe. The main link between the physics of the smallest and largest structures in the Universe is the idea of…

Astronomy is an observationally-led subject where chance discoveries play an important role. A whole range of such discoveries is continually made, from the trivial to the highly significant. What is generally needed is for luck to strike…

A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of…

For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not…

The crisis in the reproducibility of experiments invites a re-evaluation of methods of inquiry and validation procedures. The text challenges current assumptions of knowledge acquisition and introduces G-complexity for defining decidable…

Phase transitions are part of everyday life, yet are also believed to be part of the history of our universe, where the nature of particle interactions change as the universe settles into its vacuum state. The discovery of the Higgs, and…

We are at an interesting juncture in cosmology. With new methods and technology, the accuracy in measurement of the Hubble constant has vastly improved, but a recent tension has arisen that is either signaling new physics or as-yet…

The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…

A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…

Naturalness has for many years been a guiding principle in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model, particularly for understanding the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking. However, the discovery of the Higgs particle at 125…

The past 50 years has seen cosmology go from a field known for the errors being in the exponents to precision science. The transformation, powered by ideas, technology, a paradigm shift and culture change, has revolutionized our…