What Science Should be About (but Academia Often Isn’t): The Joy of Discovery

2014-03-20 Daniel Community Aspects, Doing Science, General Tips, Improving your Creativity, Inspiration, Learning to do Science, People, Science 0

There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be.
Charles Sanders Pierce

I’m critical of the situation in Academia, esp. with the pyramid-scheme of dealing with the next generation of scientists. Or with the way research is frequently done, esp. in psychology. And depending on whom you follow on Twitter and which blogs you read, it can get depressing quickly.

So, it’s nice to get an occasional reminder what science is about: The Joy of Discovery. OpenCulture has a nice posting — The Touching Moment When Physicist Andrei Linde Learns That His Theories on the Big Bang Were Finally Validated — showing this video:

As much as the current implementation of science sucks, I think these moments and these insights are worth it. 🙂

A comment for those seeking to use this site for personal gain: Given the increase in requests, let me be clear. I write on this blog because I want to. It’s my hobby, my playground. Sometimes people point me to interesting products/services and I write about them. But any request regarding ads or sponsored placements ends up the trash without a reply. And if you think something would be of interest, differentiate yourself from the spammers by referring to a posting — in an intelligent way. (I get enough auto-generated mails to identify them immediately.)

BTW, posts can get updated after I published them if I spot spelling errors (not a native speaker) or think a different wording might improve precision and clarity.

This blog is not focused on a single topic, or method. As long as it is relevant to improving creativity (or allowing it in the first place), it's fair game.
Some postings on this blog deal with freedom, as I think that we need freedom of thought, of speech, of association, etc. pp. to solve mankind's problems. Thus, some postings may seem a bit remote when it comes to organizing creativity. Freedom is, however, the bedrock of creativity.
The heterogeneity of the postings can make reading this blog a bit cumbersome, at least if you are only interested in one topic. You can either use the search function (above), or use the categories or the tags to narrow down the postings you see.

ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

How to generate, capture, and collect ideas to realize creative projects.

What Science Should be About (but Academia Often Isn’t): The Joy of Discovery