Posted by: rsr
Subject tags: society, science, biology
on
Dec 28, 2008
Those familiar with Open2it from its early days will readily discern that this blog represents a small change of format. After considering my place in this community, I decided to move my blog into the threaded community blog. I really like the intermingling of blog posts by all Open2it members and, frankly, I felt a bit left out in having a separate blog. From now on, my shorter contributions will appear among those of other members, while my longer notes will be assigned as either Articles or Essays.
Something that has fired more than a few neurons in my brain is a fundamental duality in science: the relative importance of ideas and data. Science, for those who are rusty on the nuts and bolts, is about hypothesis testing. There is a procedural formula for scientific research that proceeds from ideas to data gathering to analysis to answering questions and finally to asking new questions based on what was learned. The process is rather unending, which is appealing to some, but it boils down to a back and forth between ideas and data.
