We shouldn't pick on these people, they were among many web sites to recycle the story about an Unexpected Plasmonic Discovery from NetWorlddirectory. The original press release even had it. Sure, there are some expected discoveries, like when you are seeking the source of the Nile. But in science, good research is all about finding the unexpected. The reason for mentioning things, apart from protecting the language, is that far too much research these days knows the answers before the experiment begins. That's not science: it is stamp collecting.
30 April 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
It's lovely once you're in!
The unexpected in science was enumerated recently in correspondence with Nature. After considering some 30,133,141 abstracts, Michal Jasienski of National-Louis University in Poland came to the following conclusion:
"The study of nature does indeed seem to surprise us. The odds of finding in abstracts of scientific research papers a result or conclusion described as 'surprising', 'unexpected', or 'unusual' are an order of magnitude greater than in standard language and several times greater than in non-science academic abstracts."
Interesting. Thanks for the pointer to Nature I had missed it.
Personally, I am more inclined to the comment at the end of the piece you cite: One might think that academic machismo or realism would cause scientists to downplay their surprise, but, on the other hand, overstating the level of astonishment may occur when striving for media attention.
I guess my line is that if a discovery is "expected" it is not a discovery.
That fits in with my equally heretical view that a lot of the "science" done these days is not research so much as stamp collecting, filling in the gaps.
I am not alone in this. One Nobel prize winner I talked to certainly excluded enumerating the human genome from genuine research. And he ran a lot of the work.
Post a Comment