Echoing the cogitation that earned other people the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for biodiveristy and the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for astronomy, Ohio University Professor Emeritus William Romoser has announced a planetload of his own discoveries. The university celebrated Romoser’s recent findings, in a November 19, 2019 press release that says: Photos show evidence of […]
Tag: discoveries
A call to help unexpected discoveries get discovered
Several well-known, much-respected scientists published this letter in The Guardian: We need more scientific mavericks “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” said Richard Feynman in the 1960s. But times change…. [But now,] applicants’ proposals must convince their peers that they serve national policies and are the best possible uses of resources. [A large […]
The value of “de-discovery”
News reports about science tend to be filled with excited, exciting accounts of new discoveries. Some of them turn out, later, to be mistaken. This passage in a New York Times article by Carl Zimmer mentions a perhaps rare effort to counteract that cycle of excitation and evaporation: Yet [virus researcher] Dr. [Ian W.] Lipkin […]