scientists – Page 2 – Harmonia Philosophica

Elite scientists can hold back science.

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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: Science is not immune to interpersonal bullshit. Scientists can be stubborn. They can use their gravitas to steamroll new ideas. Which means those new ideas often only prevail when older scientists die.

Recently, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) released a working paper — titled, “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?” — that puts Planck’s principle to the test.

Sifting through citations in the PubMed database, they found evidence that when a prominent researcher suddenly dies in an academic subfield, a period of new ideas and innovation follow. (1)

Scientists as all people are… humans.

And humans are weak.

Weak people led by stronger ones.

Do not misunderstand scientists for great people. They are just sheep.

Watch out for the sheep dog instead…

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 their names on 41% of all papers. Among the most highly cited work, this elite group can be found among the co-authors of 87% of papers.

The ranks of scientists who repeatedly published more than one paper per year thin out dramatically. Many of these prolific scientists are likely the heads of laboratories or research groups; they bring in funding, supervise research, and add their names to the numerous papers that result. Others may be scientists with enough job security and time to do copious research themselves, Ioannidis says. But there’s also a lot of grunt work behind these papers that appear like clockwork from highly productive labs. “In many disciplines, doctoral students may be enrolled in high numbers, offering a cheap workforce,” Ioannidis and his co-authors write in their paper.

The new research, published on 9 July in PLOS ONE, was led by epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in Palo Alto. (1)

Science driven by non-scientific elements.
Science driven by directors who just “add their names” to papers.
Science driven by phD-candidates slaves.
Science driven by people who publish more than an article per year, while great scientists in the past published one book in 10 years. We have lost the measure of what science really is. Is a publication all that it takes to become a scientist? Do you really love science if all you care about is not to discover the truth but to print a paper?

As the number of published papers increases, the quality of true SCIENCE will fall.
And that is a fact.
Actually, I am planning on publishing it…

Pioneers need no references!

A scientific paper on the aortic valve published on 1968. Had only one 500-years-old reference: Leonardo da Vinci who first explored the matter of how this valve worked. (1)

This is what today’s scientists will never understand: Pioneers do not need references.

Science, wake up the women!

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is looking for a particular kind of biologist: a feminist one. The university has set up a fellowship, administered by its women’s studies department, for life sciences research. While it may sound strange for a social sciences department to host a biologist, the researchers in charge of the new fellowship are hoping to make it more of a norm.

Scholars have long talked about how gender bias affects biology research. Thirty years ago, biologists always described sperm as “penetrating” or “burrowing” into passive eggs, even after research showed that eggs play an active role in fertilization… and that sperm’s swimming is too weak to penetrate an egg. Today, scientists know that eggs and sperm recognize each other, grab onto each other, and fuse to form embryos. (So romantic!) But gender bias continues in other branches of biology. Just this month, Popular Science reported on the problems behind neuroscience studies purporting to find “hardwired” differences between men’s and women’s brains. (1)

Men have taken the places of women in the cosmos.
Men have imposed their mechanistic masculine view of the world.
Men have dominated philosophical thought with ideas about right and wrong.

Do we really need to have something penetrate something else?
Do we really need to define what is being penetrated?

The world is not about penetration only.
The world is not about right and wrong.
The world is all united into One.

Please wake up the women in order to start seeing it again.

Listen to stupid people you Science!

For centuries people have observed strange phenomena before large earthquakes, such as light emanating from ridges and mountaintops. These reports were once dismissed by many scientists, in part because they are often entangled in unscientific theories. For example, some who reported the lights thought they were produced by UFOs.

But the lights are not (necessarily) hallucinations nor created by E.T. “Earthquake lights are a real phenomenon–they’re not UFOs,” researcher Robert Thériault, a geologist at Quebec’s Ministry of Natural Resources, told Nature. “They can be scientifically explained.”

In study published in the January/February issue of the journal Seismological Research Letters, Thériault and colleagues pulled together reliable sightings of these lights since 1600, and found some strange similarities. A total of 63 out of the 65 sightings occurred along nearly vertical faults. The researchers suggest that along these faults, the stress of rocks grinding against each other produces electrical charges, which can travel upward and interact with the atmosphere to create light. (1)

Science is often found to discard claims from “stupid citizens” on the basis that these claims are made by “non experts”. Censoring things based on what you ALREADY know is simply UNscientific. Listening to what you do not understand and accept is the way to go forward. Science should get down from its throne and start listening to simple people telling stupid things.

There are treasures hidden in the garbage…