13 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
The World Needs Heretics
As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science... 1 
notes
notesScientists who challenge the dominant paradigms.
27 AUG 2012 by ideonexus
Human Rights
After ages of error, after wandering in all the mazes of vague and defective theories, writers upon politics and the law of nations at length arrived at the knowledge of the true rights of man, which they deduced from this simple principle: that he is a being endowed with sensation, capable of reasoning upon and understanding his interests, and of acquiring moral ideas.
They saw that the maintenance of his rights was the only object of political union, and that the perfection of the socia...Folksonomies: human rights paradigm
Folksonomies: human rights paradigm
1 notes
notesEarly concept natural philosophy, refuted the established paradigm.
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Problem with Paradigms
The success of the paradigm... is at the start largely a promise of success ... Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise... Mopping up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science... That enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those... 1 notes
notesIs that scientists tend to try and keep nature in the box, ignoring phenomena that fall outside the paradigm.
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Science Depends on Revolutions Large and Small
Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'put... 1 notes
notesSmall ones, like the discovery of oxygen and Uranus, that requires thinking in a way to uncover anomalies.
31 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
The Impossibility of Continental Drift
Even more difficult to explain, than the breaking-up of a single mass into fragments, and the drifting apart of these blocks to form the foundations of the present-day continents, is the explanation of the original production of the single mass, or PANGAEA, by the concentration of the former holosphere of granitic sial into a hemisphere of compressed and crushed gneisses and schists. Creep and the effects of compression, due to shrinking or other causes, have been appealed to but this is hard... 1 notes
notesIt does sound crazy on the face of it.
24 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Scientific Truth Must Come Out of Controversy
Scientific truth, like puristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. It seems to mean that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it into a textbook for sophomores written ... 1 notes
notesThere is the ideal of scientific facts taught without passion and the reality of impassioned conflict within scientific exploration.
