Sense about Science, a UK based group trying to equip the public to understand scientific and medical claims to which they are exposed, has launched a new campaign Ask for Evidence that seems well worth supporting.
The concept is simple and should make sense to most people. When someone makes a claim, you should (and have every right to) ask why you should believe that claim. Ask for evidence. Below, I have illustrated an example of this: Continue reading “Ask for Evidence”
The editor of the journal Remote Sensing just resigned over the fact that his journal published a paper that should never have been published. Real Climate explains what that means – being controversial or eventually shown wrong is *not* an indication that a paper shouldn’t have been published. This is what makes a paper bad:
But what makes a paper ‘bad’ though? It is certainly not a paper that simply comes to a conclusion that is controversial or that goes against the mainstream, and it isn’t that the paper’s conclusions are unethical or immoral. Instead, a ‘bad’ paper is one that fails to acknowledge or deal with prior work, or that makes substantive errors in the analysis, or that draws conclusions that do not logically follow from the results, or that fails to deal fairly with alternative explanations (or all of the above). Of course, papers can be mistaken or come to invalid conclusions for many innocent reasons and that doesn’t necessarily make them ‘bad’ in this sense.
I love John Baez’s blog that was a blog before we called things blogs, This Week’s Finds. (He also writes the Azimuth blog, linked in our blogroll below. And I tip my hat to my father-in-law, who first introduced me to Baez’s blog.)
Baez is now writing on network theory. Baez typically focuses on math and physics, but this series is great for biologists:
I wish there were a branch of mathematics—in my dreams I call it green mathematics—that would interact with biology and ecology just as fruitfully as traditional mathematics interacts with physics. If the 20th century was the century of physics, while the 21st is the century of biology, shouldn’t mathematics change too? As we struggle to understand and improve humanity’s interaction with the biosphere, shouldn’t mathematicians have some role to play?
And while you’re over there, check out his section on how to learn math and physics, and his advice to young scientists.
Along with Gleick’s outstanding biography, Lawrence Krauss’ Quantum Man is now one of the essential Feynman books. While Gleick’s book is biography at its finest, Krauss’s is the best picture of Feynman’s position within the physics community, which is obviously something that could only be written by a serious physicist, like Krauss. Krauss, better than anyone else, has explained why Feynman was seen as a great scientist by physicists themselves, who are not the types to be swayed by the anecdotes that made Feynman popular with the public. Feynman was a great public communicator, and purposely developed a particular public persona, but his physics accomplishments were completely equal to his fame, as Krauss makes clear. I learned more about Feynman’s style of doing science (including its weaknesses of insularity) from this book than from any other.
So here’s how I would categorize the existing Feynman biographies: Continue reading “I can’t decide whether Quantum Man is the best Feynman biography”
Charles Bennett has a beef with the wording of an article title in Science: “At long last, Gravity Probe B satellite proves Einstein right”.
I find myself frequently repeating to students and the public that science doesn’t “prove” theories. Scientific measurements can only disprove theories or be consistent with them.
Instead of going on about the philosophy of science at length, let’s just quote the spot-on quote from their response:
Bennett is completely correct. It’s an important conceptual point, and we blew it.
Bravo!
The Finch and Pea 