Asimov on Scientific Discovery
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ [I’ve found it!], but ‘That’s funny.’
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“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ [I’ve found it!], but ‘That’s funny.’
(Click here to view comments)
I recently read Margalit Fox’s wonderful book, “The Riddle of the Labyrinth,” which tells the extraordinary tale of how three people, working in parallel, figured out the meaning of what, to me, look like random scribbles on ancient tablets – the language known as Linear B. In trying to deduce the riddle of these scribbles,…
The surgeon told the Weindel family that the operation had gone well. He had taken Dale Weindel’s stomach and cut it into two, and rerouted his small intestines so that all the food Weindel ate would now pass through the smaller portion of his stomach. He had given Weindel a “gastric bypass” operation, the best…
As a behavioral scientist, I have long been interested in self-deception. But I’ve never thought about it this way before, as pictured in a tremendous drawing by Jonathan Bartlett: (Click here to view comments)
I recently posted several humorous pictures illustrating the risks of assuming that correlation amounts to causation. But now comes along another interesting picture, that practically forces me to abandon scientific rigor and embrace the inevitable conclusion – that chocolate consumption leads to genius: Is everybody on board with my reasoning? (Click here to view comments)
I have conducted a number of studies on a phenomenon sometimes referred to as emotional adaptation. The basic idea behind this phenomenon is that people often respond with strong emotions to significant changes in their circumstances, but these emotions tend to diminish over time. Moreover, people often fail to anticipate this change in emotions, a failure…
Behavioral economists have written a lot about sunk costs. The idea is pretty simple: once people have invested in an effort – in time or money – they stick with that effort longer than is otherwise justified. They don’t want to feel like they’ve wasted their investment, so they continue to invest even when pulling…