And if you’re interested in reading more about theories, proof and scientific progress, from physics to medicine, you may be interested in my new book: https://proof.kucharski.io
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Or indeed some of the classics - Poppers' the Logic of Scientific Discovery or one of my favourites Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A shame really how few scientists ever engage with this material and so have very unrealistic perspectives on scientific knowledge creation.
Those books are not fun reads and both are pretty dated. I found Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions especially hard-going. The product-of-its-time type misogyny and the physics-is-the-only-real-science vibes were grating AF.
Newtonian mechanics flew humans to the moon - is the theory really falsified just because it’s not universally applicable? We still teach Newtonian mechanics up to master degree physics - I’d argue that Einstein is yet to replace Newton… (really enjoying the book by the way!)
I also found it interesting how much their work was later misinterpreted, e.g. Kuhn became frustrated with the use of ‘paradigm’ as a target rather than an observation.
Many scientists (& clinicians) are I think borderline unreconstructed logical positivists. Lack knowledge history & philosophy real shame. See same in other direction; glaring lack of basic science knowledge i.e lost track how often @lrb.co.uk make basic errors in if something is virus or bacteria.
Indeed. My favourite was a letter page of @lrb.co.uk full of letters from readers about some error that had been made in discussing Shakespeare. On same page MRSA was referred to several times as a virus. No letters on this subject appeared.
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https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/27/4/543/754806