In spite of the title of his most important book ( The Logic of Scientific Discovery -LSD-, published originally in German as The Logik der Forschung , in 1935), Karl Popper’s fundamental claim about the rules of science is that they are not a matter of logic , in the sense that they cannot be […]
I’m a man slowly sliding into the old age. Being a scientist (a simple science worker), this means that for decades I’ve become familiar with the uncomfortable feeling of struggling to adapt to a constant, quick change of everything. In the very beginning of my career, still an undergrad, I joined a lab where my […]
The progress that physics experienced during the 20 th century was probably one of the greatest and most everlasting successes of the humankind. Discovering the hidden and minute composition of matter and energy, as well as realising that the rules they obey are as further from common sense as quantum theory has revealed, are amongst […]
In our previous entries , we asked why it is that collaborating scientists prefer to publish one single paper in which all their contributions are ‘mixed’, instead of one individual paper by each co-author (with quotations to the other collaborator’s paper where necessary). There is a relatively obvious (but, as I shall show, partial) answer […]
Let me leave aside for a moment our talk about scientists and papers, and bring up a topic that, at first sight, might seem totally unconnected: Ronald Coase’s economic theory about the firm and the allocation of property rights. As in the case of the problem we mentioned in our last entry (why scientists share […]
The allocation of merit to individual scientists is one of the crucial aspects of how scientific systems work. Publication of ‘papers’ in important journals, and, still most significantly, citation of those papers in the works of colleagues, is perhaps (with all its shortcomings ) the most determinant mechanism for recognising the value and capacity of […]
In 1951, the physicist Paul A.M. Dirac called for the re-introduction of the æther in an oft-quoted letter to Nature. His was an attempt to resuscitate an epistemic object that most scientists at the time, as much as today, judged to be dead and buried. By using the old-fashioned spelling, Dirac was making a statement […]
The problem of what is the relation between matter and mind, and more particularly, between the physical stuff of our brain, on the one hand, and our consciousness and their conscious, qualitative states (also known as ‘qualia’), certainly is one of the deepest and hardest questions in all philosophy. I have already written in Mapping […]
This article is not about supporting the use of animals for research or to justify the need of such models for the advance of our society (many others have addressed that already). This post is neither about the constant pressure that researchers feel from peers, funding bodies or institutions to do more and more. The […]
One of the most popular ideas within the new and fashionable transhumanism craze is that, in the future humans, will be able of reaching a kind of ‘immortality’ by decoding the information contained in your brain, ‘uploading’ it to some kind of memory device, and making it live on a computer (see, e.g., Seung 2012) […]