replication – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "replication"

DailyDirt: Science With (And Without) Verification

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The scientific method has undoubtedly advanced the growth of knowledge, but with the enormous amount of data that can be collected now, it can be difficult to turn all that information into reliable and understandable facts. On the other hand, science is also pushing the boundaries of what can possibly be measured — but can we still call it science if we’re proposing unknowable multiverses and spatial dimensions that can never be explored? Almost anyone can publish their crazy ideas — and sometimes those sketchy papers submitted to arxiv.org lead to successful work proving an infinite number of twin primes. Do the crackpots outnumber the “real” scientists? Does it matter?

• Advances in cosmology are pulling away from experimental verification. Some theorists argue that their theories to explain the universe may not be verifiable by observations — and that it doesn’t matter. They assert we’re in a “post-empirical” period for understanding fundamental physics. [url]
• Verification of experimental results is a fundamental aspect of science, right? Providing more funding for researchers to perform replication experiments may be increasingly necessary to ensure our scientific knowledge isn’t merely based on anecdotes (or bad experiments or biased analysis). [url]
• Will traditional scholarly journals have a future? There’s a growing movement to decentralize the peer review and publication process that doesn’t require a for-profit scholarly journal. Yay? [url]

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Filed Under: arxiv, cosmology, crackpots, experiments, journals, knowledge, multiverses, peer review, physics, prime numbers, replication, science, scientific method, verification