How the Search for Beauty Drives Scientific Enquiry
We surveyed thousands of scientists in four countries and learned just how important beauty is to them.

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We surveyed thousands of scientists in four countries and learned just how important beauty is to them.
Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence.
Imagine using version control to track the process of research in real time. Peer review becomes a community-governed process, where the quality of engagement becomes the hallmark of individual reputations. All research outputs can be published and credited with not an 'impact factor' in sight.
Students need to be given real and significant things from the world to think with and about if teachers want to influence how they do that thinking.
Contrary to commonsense belief, attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics discourage initiative, innovation and risk-taking. The entrepreneurial element of human nature is stifled by metric fixation.
If you want to explore things you haven’t explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way. We must see the forest, thinks Scott Page collegiate professor of complex systems, and author of the book book "The Diversity Bonus".
It might style itself as a grassroots movement but citizen science is little more than a cheap land-grab by big business.
Perverse incentives and the misuse of quantitative metrics have undermined the integrity of scientific research.
Staid and conformist, science risks losing its creative spark. Does it need more mavericks, or are they part of the problem?
It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of ‘information’. His answer was both a revelation and a return.
Would it be better to do away with the search for excellence, and to fund science by lottery?
If we abandon the cult of the Great White Innovator, we will understand the history of technology in a much deeper way.
By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience