Category: Scientists
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Short answers to important questions
Hawking said that there is no God. (1) Should we care? The answer: No. Hawking was a good (not even the best) scientist in his specific field (and there are MANY fields in science). But he is not a philosopher. He actually believed that philosophy is dead. And surely he is not a good theologian.…
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Chemistry Nobel 2018: A sad reminder...
Techniques that put natural evolution on fast-forward to build new proteins in the lab have earned three scientists this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry. Frances Arnold of Caltech won for her method of creating customized enzymes for biofuels, environmentally friendly detergents and other products. She becomes the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in…
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Elite scientists can hold back science.
Max Planck — the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who pioneered quantum theory — once said the following about scientific progress: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Shorter:…
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Science. Papers. Progress. Brave scientists. Admitting mistakes...
Science chases progress. Researchers live under pressure from grant agencies, their peers, and the public to produce exciting results. New finds make headlines; checking old work usually does not. But when a recent study of human behavior by Sarah Brown-Schmidt and Sid Horton failed to reproduce a result from the authors' earlier research, they published…
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Science. Publications. A lost cause...
Publishing is one of the most ballyhooed metrics of scientific careers, and every researcher hates to have a gap in that part of his or her CV. Here’s some consolation: A new study finds that very few scientists—fewer than 1%—manage to publish a paper every year. But these 150,608 scientists dominate the research journals, having…
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