Horgan Seminar Blog

Trying to uncover objective truths in our modern world is like trying to find compromise in congress- due to financing, basically impossible. When there is the chance for financial gain on the table, in either congress or science, methods for reaching the payment are never by the book exactly. Members of Congress will keep the cooperations who donated to their campaigns in mind when they decide whether to sign off on proposed bills. Why would a republican who is getting half a million from the NRA every two years agree to pass a bill regulating gun usage? He would not. Similar to how scientists keep the group financing their experiment in mind when deciding how to frame their question. This is the most essential part of science, what question is being asked, and the questions scientists are looking to answer that stunt their ability to generate 'productive' or 'disruptive' discoveries. This is true for two reasons. The first reason is in our current capitalist society, ...

Armen Berenson Professor Horgan HST-401 Science Writing 24 January 2023 Bad Science and its Nuances Bad apples in the workplace: the uninterested and pill-pushing physician, the construction worker who cuts corners towards the end of the day, and the chef who serves frozen lobster but prices them like they’re fresh. Hey, these aren’t crimes punishable by death or imprisonment, but they are reckless and sometimes unethical ways to conduct one’s career, and it seems fair to assume that everyone is prone to cutting corners at some point in their life. A prime example of this disheartening facet of the human condition lies within the ever-broadening body of scientific work humanity continues to amass. Yes, even the seemingly cold, cut, and dry pursuit of scientific discovery can be, and often is, manipulated by an insincere or simply unaware researcher, and it might be killing science’s credibility altogether. This practice probably isn't always as sinister as I’m making it sound. I ha...

It’s terribly easy to forget how easy scientific advancements have made our lives. Right now I am sitting in a comfortably heated room, sheltered from today’s rain, while outlining this piece on a machine whose processing power far surpasses anything used to put a man on the moon, and yet I am able to stuff it into my bag as I rush out the door to class each morning. But, recent predictions regarding the scientific community and its progress have compelled me to think, what’s the point? We learn so much about science’s rapid progress in the past, but what’s happening now? Is it slowing down? And if it is, can an argument be made that science, as we know it, is reaching its end? Nature has recently published findings that have determined that as the 21st century progresses, scientific findings are slowly becoming less and less disruptive. In other words, recent advancements in science, more specifically those within the last six decades are less likely to “ break with the past in wa...

  Richael Lamendola  Professor Horgan  HST 401 25 January 2023 COVID-19’s Collapse of Science In the mind of the public, scientific evidence often is used near synonymously with objectivity, rationality, and truth. Highly-educated experts conduct years of research in search of answers to incredibly difficult questions. Because of this, there is an air of authority that, in the past, has been afforded to any field of scientific research. How then, in the wake of a deadly, viral pandemic, are there large swaths of people acting in direct contradiction - and at times open opposition - to the recommendations of leading experts? During a global pandemic, most would think that science would be the nation’s number one priority in an attempt to keep our country safe and healthy. However, the reality of COVID-19 has proved quite the opposite as a significant number of American adults are losing faith in science. In a study conducted by Pew Research Center, it was reported that in ...

Is science a waste of time, resources and money? This is the current question of many scientific writers and people looking towards the science field for revolutionary discoveries. Articles like Science is Getting Less Bang for its Buck by Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen describe that modern science could be seen as less efficient than in the 1910’s to 1930’s purely based on the magnitude of discoveries. Collison and Nielsen argue that modern science has produced less revolutionary discoveries in physics based on the number of Nobel Peace prizes that have been awarded on modern discoveries when compared to the 1910’s to 1930’s. It was even said that some of the modern discoveries in physics like the discovery of gravitational waves are miniscule to the discoveries of the past like Einstein’s 1915 discovery of his general theory of relativity. They continue by stating that “Not only did general relativity predict gravitational waves, it also radically changed our understanding of ...

Science is a reliable method for gaining knowledge about the natural world, but it is not without its controversies and limitations. An example of this is found in the opening paragraph of the article, “Science Isn’t Broken”, from FiveThirtyEight. It highlights multiple instances where the scientific peer-review process was voided in one way or another, which shows how some scientific processes are flawed and can be abused. This jeopardizes the legitimacy of science because if some individuals are able to bypass the processes put in place to prevent such things from happening, then how are we supposed to trust science, if at all?  The drive of science, as we know it, is curiosity. In most cases, it seems as though the scientific community conducts itself in a professional manner, seeking out the universe’s answers without compromising ethics and morality. Not everyone shares this view. A select few of scientists/researchers choose to cut corners in their discoveries and seek person...

The barrier to enter the research industry is too high. A reformation is needed to help beginners become researchers and researchers communicate with beginners. The image above was created using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image creating software with the prompt, “A drawing of a college student having difficulty reading an academic paper.”      In 2011 , less than 1% of the world’s human population read and used research papers in their work. This was estimated by founder of Academia , Richard Price, with data from the National Science Foundation and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a  blogpost  from 2011. So why are there so little?       Why do 99% of humans not read the frontier of human knowledge everyday? It seems to be that academic articles are not written for the 99%, they are written for other academics and researchers to read. What’s the point of the research if most humans never see it? Why are we not writing research papers so that th...

  Mid Life Science by Ashton Hummler Is science dying? I’d say science is having a “mid-life crisis” where it’s trying to relive the glory days and trying to recapture that vivacious energy it had during its prime. A study by Nature which analyzed over 45 million scientific papers over the past six decades shows a considerable decline in “disruptive” scientific findings. A “disruptive” finding is a discovery that is revolutionary or earth shattering that completely redefines how a subject is perceived, some examples being the heliocentric model of the solar system and the double helix. Perhaps this is just an instance of “low tide” for science, and a high tide will come with a huge wave of new momentous discoveries. However, with all that humanity has already discovered about the reality we reside in, there has to be a point when we eventually hit a wall and discover there is to discover, or everything available to us.  It's an inevitability that we will one day “run out of ...