Occasional Musings

The opening of the article states “Plenty of today’s scientific theories will one day be discredited. So should we be sceptical of science itself?”

This is an apt opening and a useful question which has to be asked every once in a while by all practicing scientists. Science is evidence based and it keeps changing and one must not become complacent about a certain theory is valid for all times…

Here is an interesting excerpt from the article:

”

No group of believers has more reason to be sure of its own good sense than today’s professional scientists. There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition. What makes a method of enquiry count as scientific is not that it employs microscopes, rats, computers or people in stained white coats, but that it seeks to test itself at every turn. If a method is as rigorous and cautious as it can be, it counts as good science; if it isn’t, it doesn’t. Yet this fact sets a puzzle. If science is careful scepticism writ large, shouldn’t a scientific cast of mind require one to be sceptical of science itself?

There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they should be sceptical of the scientific method itself. But there is an awkward public-relations challenge for any champion of hard-nosed science. When scientists confront the deniers of evolution, or the devotees of homeopathic medicine, or people who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism—all of whom are as demonstrably mistaken as anyone can be—they understandably fight shy of revealing just how riddled with error and misleading information the everyday business of science actually is. When you paint yourself as a defender of the truth, it helps to keep quiet about how often you are wrong.”

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More of this here: [The Link]

Here is an interesting article from Gaurdian about a research from a group in Univ of Chicago. Basically the claim is that the research is on to a method to analyze various published theories and stack them against experimental data to verify those theories, and more importantly, suggest new theories/hypothesis. This is certainly an interesting are of research I wish to keep an eye on. This also relates back to an earlier article that I found [Earlier Article from Edge.org] about a similar principle. Here is an excerpt from the article

“Computer programs increasingly are able to integrate published knowledge with experimental data, search for patterns and logical relations, and enable new hypotheses to emerge with little human intervention,” they write. “We predict that within a decade, even more powerful tools will enable automated, high-volume hypothesis generation to guide high-throughput experiments in biomedicine, chemistry, physics, and even the social sciences.”..

• More about this here: [The Link]
• Link to earlier article from edge: [The Link]