Scientific discoveries have moulded modern society. But the reliability of scientific results have recently been called into question. How will scientists solve this problem?
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Scientific method
Displaying 61 - 80 of 83 articles
Last March, the BICEP2 collaboration announced that they had used a microwave telescope at the South Pole to detect primordial gravitational waves. These tiny ripples in spacetime would be the first proof…
Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman gets called a lot of things. He calls himself the greatest cornerback in the NFL (and Seattle fans tend to agree). Sportswriters and some other players call…
Scientists should study pseudoscience – see what the pseudoscientists are up to and perhaps (for a laugh) try a few pseudostudies themselves. Critically, scientists must learn what really distinguishes…
“China is at the forefront of medicine and hi-tech and computing.” So said UK Chancellor George Osborne, who recently visited the country. Global tests for 15-year-olds show the youth of Shanghai are comfortably…
Bankers aim to maximise profits. Scientists aim to understand reality. But Mike Peacey of the University of Bristol suggests, based on a new model he has just published in Nature, that both professionals…
Over the past few years, there has been a growing awareness that many experimentally established “facts” don’t seem to hold up to repeated investigation. This was highlighted in a 2010 article in the New…
In the lead up to the release next month of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fifth Assessment Report we are exploring concepts of confidence and certainty in climate science. You…
In the lead up to the release next month of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fifth Assessment Report we are exploring concepts of confidence and certainty in climate science. The…
In the lead up to the release next month of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fifth Assessment Report we are exploring concepts of confidence and certainty in climate science – beginning…
Science is knowledge gained from reproducible observations or experiments. Yet in a commentary in Nature in May last year, researchers from biotechnology company Amgen reported that the findings in 90…
Scientific fraud has raised its ugly head once more. In a note to chemists in the journal Organic Letters, Amos Smith, the editor-in-chief, has announced that an analysis of data submitted to the journal…
The debate over the impact of playing violent videogames on aggressive attitudes and behaviour is a long and heated one. Based on my research, I would argue the link is not as straightforward as A + B…
What roles do unconscious influences play on your behaviour and decision-making? The answer might not be as simple as you think. Imagine I showed you a list of words one by one on a computer screen and…
Fraud. It’s an ugly word, an arresting word. As with “cheating” it comes loaded with negative connotations, but can potentially lead to far greater penalties and consequences. And yet fraud in science…
In a sense, there is no such thing as climate change denial. No one denies that climate changes (in fact, the most common climate myth is the argument that past climate change is evidence that current…
Striving for agreement between theory and experiment and pushing the boundaries of precision are important parts of the scientific process. With each step in this process we move closer to enlightenment…
Empirical science needs data. But all data are subject to random variation, and random variation obscures patterns in data. So statistical methods are used to make inferences about the true patterns or…
At the heart of the scientific method is the process of hypothesis testing. Given an observable phenomenon in the world, a scientist will construct a hypothesis which seeks to explain that phenomenon…
The Book of the Dead describes the ancient Egyptian “weighing of the heart” ceremony as the placing of a heart on one side of a set of scales and a feather on the other. Goddess Ma'at’s feather represents…
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Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Education; Curriculum Director, UQ Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland
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