Illustration: Cristiana Couceiro,
microsoft office 2010 generator, Scientis: Getty Photographs It all commenced with the sound of static. In May possibly 1964,
microsoft office 2007 Professional Plus, two astronomers at Bell Labs,
microsoft office 2007 Ultimate activation, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were employing a radio telescope in suburban New Jersey to search the far reaches of space. Their intention was to produce a thorough survey of radiation inside Milky Way, which might allow for them to map all those huge tracts of the universe devoid of shiny stars. This meant that Penzias and Wilson wanted a receiver which was exquisitely delicate, in a position to eavesdrop on every one of the emptiness. And so they had retrofitted an old radio telescope, installing amplifiers as well as a calibration method for making the signals coming from space only a tiny bit louder. Nevertheless they produced the scope as well sensitive. Each time Penzias and Wilson aimed their dish with the sky, they picked up a persistent track record noise, a static that interfered with all of their observations. It had been an tremendously frustrating technical challenge, like listening to a radio station that retains cutting out. Initially, they assumed the noise was man-made, an emanation from nearby New york Metropolis. But whenever they pointed their telescope straight at Manhattan, the static didn’t increase. Another possibility was that the sound was due to fallout from recent nuclear bomb tests from the upper atmosphere. But that didn’t make sense either, since the level of interference remained constant, even as the fallout dissipated. And then there have been the pigeons: A pair of birds had been roosting from the narrow part in the receiver, leaving a trail of what they later described as “white dielectric material.” The scientists evicted the pigeons and scrubbed away their mess, but the static remained, as loud as ever. For that next year, Penzias and Wilson tried to ignore the noise,
office Professional 2007 keygen, concentrating on observations that didn’t require cosmic silence or perfect precision. They put aluminum tape over the metal joints, kept the receiver as clean as attainable,
Microsoft Office 2007 Licencia De, and hoped that a shift with the weather would possibly clear up the interference. They waited for that seasons to change, and then change again, but the noise always remained, producing it impossible to find the faint radio echoes they were looking for. Their telescope was a failure. Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things — how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he commenced an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University. Philosophers have long theorized about how science happens, but Dunbar wished to get beyond theory. He wasn’t satisfied with abstract models in the scientific process — that seven-step method we teach schoolkids before the science fair — or the dogmatic faith scientists place in logic and objectivity. Dunbar knew that scientists often don’t think the way the textbooks say they are supposed to. He suspected that all those philosophers of science — from Aristotle to Karl Popper — had missed something important about what goes on inside lab. (As Richard Feynman famously quipped, “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”) So Dunbar decided to launch an “in vivo” investigation, attempting to learn in the messiness of real experiments. He ended up spending the next year staring at postdocs and test tubes: The researchers have been his flock, and he was the ornithologist. Dunbar brought tape recorders into meeting rooms and loitered in the hallway; he read grant proposals and the rough drafts of papers; he peeked at notebooks, attended lab meetings, and videotaped interview after interview. He spent four years analyzing the data. “I’m not sure I appreciated what I was getting myself into,” Dunbar says. “I asked for complete access, and I got it. But there was just so a whole lot to keep track of.” Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply irritating pursuit. Although the researchers had been mostly applying established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists have been looking for X, but they found Y. Dunbar was fascinated by these statistics. The scientific system, right after all, is supposed to be an orderly pursuit of the truth, full of elegant hypotheses and control variables. (Twentieth-century science philosopher Thomas Kuhn, for instance, defined normal science as the kind of research in which “everything but the most esoteric detail in the result is known in advance.”) Nonetheless, when experiments were observed up near — and Dunbar interviewed the scientists about even the most trifling details — this idealized version of your lab fell apart, replaced by an endless supply of disappointing surprises. There were models that didn’t work and data that couldn’t be replicated and simple studies riddled with anomalies. “These weren’t sloppy many people,” Dunbar says. “They had been working in some on the finest labs from the world. But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science.”Pages: Preceding 1 2 3 | Full Page | Next