I was teaching a professional class a few days ago. Sometimes, I would also mention to students what kind of specific mistakes people may make in their scientific researches. This time, I added one page of photo-copied paper from a recent publication in one of top science journals (page number and author names had been removed) to my updated class notes that showed an obvious and serious mistake directly related to the materials I was covering in the class. One student asked in class: are there many mistakes in published science papers? I said, sure, of course, there are many, many mistakes in published science papers. Some of them are very serious. When I was young, I was so excited to find a few mistakes in published science papers by supposedly famous scientists. Now, I have already passed that period of excitation. When one gets older and learns more, one can find many and all kinds of mistakes in published science papers. Actually, you should not feel surprised about this because now there are tens or hundreds of science papers published daily or weekly in our research fields, how can we expect all those papers to be of significant science value or mistake-free? Many of those or the majority of the published science papers become useless almost instantly or in a very short period of time after publications.
To raise the awareness of reading critically and thinking independently, I think it is probably a good idea to show to students not only the exact logic behind the apparently obvious relations and facts but also some examples of obvious and serious mistakes in current science literature.
Another point I often emphasized through examples in lectures is that a good theory or a good model is the one that carries certain quantitative prediction and can be verified or tested through experiments or observations. So I told the students in class: If someday any of you happens to develop a theory or a model that you feel quite confident that it is correct and good, be sure to explicitly state in your paper what number(s) predicted/deduced from your theory can be verified or tested.
A good science theory developed by scientists is always backed up by numbers or data that can be verified. Philosophers have no data.
(2007.10.18)
posted on 2007-10-18 10:10
coolboy 阅读(174)
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